Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

Whereas when we started the first Project the chief aim was pure research, to find out more about the past in a region, now we see that the countries of Europe are faced with the great problem that there are far too many archaeological sites for them to deal with by excavation, but yet some kind of…

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This special issue of Media History (22-3/4, 2016), co-edited with Helmer Helmers (University of Amsterdam), develops a new perspective on the early modern communication revolution. It discusses news as a specific kind of information – by its nature continuous, unreliable, and diffuse – which needed…

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism.

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Why are professors still warning their students against dogmatism, prejudice, pedantry, and other centuries-old vices? What explains the persistence of these scholarly vices across the ages?

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) and the Leiden University Institute for History (LUIH) are looking for a PhD in the History and Culture of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of Strategy offers a history of the practice of strategy from the beginning of recorded history, to the late eighteenth century, from all parts of the world.

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.

The fragmentary is everywhere: we encounter fragments in social media (Tiktok, Twitter), in personal memories from our childhood, and in traditions from our cultural heritage.

Material Culture, Settlements, and Landscapes from the Mediterranean to Western Asia

From William Shakespeare to Marilynne Robinson, A Literary History of Reconciliation is the first study to examine representations of interpersonal reconciliation in work of literature across a long-term period, from the early seventeenth century to the present day, focusing on how these representations…

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial…

This project combines and reconsiders all the available evidence of the Scheurrak SO1, and use new archival databases and modern archaeological techniques to shed new light on the material culture of the Baltic grain trade and the Holland shipbuilding industry at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

This project studies the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems to establish the character of past “natural” landscapes and enhance the management of current ones.

The second major collection of papers from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project.

On the 11th of October, Micheal Swanton succesfully defended his PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Micheal on this great result.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

An Investigation into the role of copper-alloy craft production in the early medieval economy of northwest Europe.

The Classics Master, a specialization of the Classics and Ancient Civilizations program at Leiden University, gives you the opportunity to study the Greek and Roman world with a focus on Greek and Latin language and literature.

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

Volume II of The Cambridge History of Strategy focuses on the practice of strategy from 1800 to the present day.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Liu Puning defended his thesis on 25 April 2018.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Which genes are involved in woodiness and associated traits such as drought tolerance, flowering time, stem elongation, life span, and plant herbivory, and how do these gene regulatory pathways overlap?

During the Leiden Science Family Day, you can take part in various workshops. You can also watch various demonstrations. Where will you go?