For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…

Are you thinking about studying Russian and Eurasian Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

The one-year MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University is a unique programme that stands out for its interdisciplinary approach and relevance to current global affairs.

How did our academic community position itself in relation to a system that deprived people of their freedom? What role did the university, as an educational institution, play with regard to colonialism and the system of slavery? How can we best engage with and manage our special collections?

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

This series provides a venue for scholarly work—research monographs and edited volumes—that advances our understanding of the history of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region. It fills an important gap in academic publishing and builds upon two relatively recent developments…

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

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

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association cooperates with the following partners:

The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

These courses address all language skills: speaking, writing, listening and reading.

Discover history and present. With it's eventful history and politics, Russia is a country with a large influence on Europe and the world. In the Dutch-taught Bachelor's programme Russian Studies you will learn everything about the culture, language and politics of the largest country in the world and…

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

Go to ‘Timetable & Registration' to see whether the course is offered as a traditional classroom and/or online course. It is not possible to switch between courses once the course has started.

How does Russia use propaganda and what characterises Russian propaganda in terms of language and argumentation?

On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

What do the cloth trade and slavery have to do with each other? Quite a lot, as it turns out, as by history student Sjoerd Ramackers demonstrated in his bachelor’s thesis. He reveals that cloth merchant Daniel van Eijs was closely associated with four plantations in Berbice, a former Dutch colony on…

The Academic Language Centre Leiden offers Russian language courses at various levels and tailor-made Russian language courses. The courses are practical in nature: focusing on the use of the language. More information can be found here >

These four volumes offer students and researchers a rich collection of published works on the history of slavery works by some of the most preeminent scholars in the field.

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

Applying linguistics research to solve practical language-related problems in society.

Using enslaved people as servants, becoming an administrator in the Dutch West India Company or making uniforms for the colonial army. Many people from Leiden played a role in colonialism and slavery. Historians are conducting preliminary research and finding striking examples.

The University of Bonn, Germany, is happy to announce the opening of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS).

The impact of war extends beyond destroyed buildings and torn families. In bilingual Ukraine, the ongoing war with Russia is a major driver for increasingly discarding the Russian language. What does this mean for the position of Russian in Ukraine?

On 18 December 2019, Mikhail Antonov defended his thesis 'Formalism, Realism and Conservatism in Russian Law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. W.B. Simons.

Due to the almost complete disappearance of the archive of the Old Dutch West India Company (WIC, 1621-1674) not much is known about the ships and crews of this company. In this project we start the reconstruction of this basic information making use of new digital humanities techniques to extract this…

The topic of Historical Linguistics and Philology at LUCL is language change in its broadest sense.

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

What did it mean to be enslaved in in the Indian Ocean world in the 18th and 19th centuries? Over the last decades, historians have mined French, British, Portuguese and Dutch records for quantitative data on the European slave trade. This project focuses on the experience of being a slave and seeks…

When discussing enslavement, attention often focuses on Africans forcibly shipped to South America. Researcher Timo McGregor's new Veni research sheds light on a lesser-known method, whereby indigenous populations were enslaved through the households of colonisers.

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

The Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics offers a varied program of specialised courses in Descriptive linguistics, in Chinese, Germanic, Indo-European, Indian, Iranian, Semitic languages and linguistics, as well as a number of introductory linguistic courses. Registration opens around…

When literature, cultural aspects, and data-driven language learning meet in a classroom.

Theoretical linguistics seeks to understand the underlying principles of the nature of human language.

LIAS researchers working in the field of linguistics hold dual appointments in LIAS and the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

Computational linguistics uses computational methods to help answer linguistics questions across a variety of topics.

In this theme you will be supplied with a firm background in the core of current computational linguistics and a solid comprehension of its neighboring fields.

The goal of the field of Applied Linguistics is to apply the findings and the techniques from research in linguistics to solve practical language-related problems in society.

There is not a day without language: we use it to read, to write, to communicate. But do you ever wonder how you learned to speak your own language as a child? And how, as an adult, do you learn new languages? Linguistics has the answer to those questions. In the BA Linguistics at Leiden University…