The project re-examines the role of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missionaries in the cultural and social developments of the Middle East and their interactions with the indigenous communities, from the nineteenth century until today. It seeks to discover and retrace such ‘entangled histories’…

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

This book provides a long-term historical analysis, exploring the roots of the low levels of corruption existing in Chile, going back to the 16th century and examining Chile’s institutional evolution until today.

What was the name, the appearance, development and the playing technique of the cello in the Low Countries between 1600 and 1800 and what music was composed for it?

This dissertation presents a comprehensive description of Xinka, an indigenous language from southeastern Guatemala. The description is based on a missionary grammar that is titled Arte de la lengua szinca and was written by the priest Manuel Maldonado de Matos around 1773.

Home to a rapidly rising superpower and the two largest economies in the world after the US, a global East Asia is seen and felt everywhere. This dynamic text views the global square from the perspective of the world’s most important rising global center.

From the mid-19th century until the 1970’s, the Middle East witnessed the presence of various European missionaries who played a fundamental role in the birth and the development of humanitarianism. Since these Christian missionaries were well integrated in the local Middle Eastern societies via their…

This PhD project studies immigrant groups in ancient Babylonia and aims at investigating their identities, socioeconomic status, and integration into an ancient multicultural society.

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

How can we explain the popularity of the Spanish comedia nueva in the seventeenth-century theatre scene of the Low Countries?

Understanding the nature, characteristics and function of the secular vocal intabulations and dances found in Italian printed keyboard sources in the 16th century

The central theme of the NWO-project ‘The Promise of Organization’ is the evolution of political organization during the 19th century. We focus on the enthusiasm, arguments and concrete activities of the organizers as well as the criticism offered by opponents of modern political organization.

How can we make the information in handwritten historical research reports accessible and searchable? Data scientists at Leiden University are working with other universities on a method that will improve access to cultural heritage.

This project compares and contrasts how and why several Turkish and Iranian women were compelled to participate in leftist guerilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

Andrea Giolai defended his thesis on 3 May 2017.

This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context.

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.

Of jars and gongs deals with the traditional ritual art of Ot Danum Dayak subsistence farmers from a stretch of tropical rainforest in the heart of Borneo. Together with the Ngaju, their neighbours to the south, they gloried in one of the most elaborate secondary mortuary rites in the world.

This research aims to study the practice of cremation in Alexandria and Graeco-Roman Egypt, through the examination of its cinerary urns.

To what extent did the street patterns in urban districts influence crime patterns?

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…

Serhan Afacan defended his thesis on 23 June 2015

Abbas provides an in-depth analysis of the complex interplay between Zionism, Jewish identity, power dynamics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ASLU 16

‘The storm of the passions rages’: The works of Johannes Jelgerhuis as a source of stagecraft for the historically informed performer.

Carsten Stahn has just published Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities and Access to Culture. The book is part of the OUP Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Series.

The goal of this research is to examine the emergence of new types of female representation in nineteenth-century ukiyo-e (woodblock prints from early modern Japan) as these images relate to the ideals of femininity of the time.

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.

By analysing neglected (continental) spy centres and integrating these groups of female intelligencers into the traditional, male-orientated historical narratives, this project will proceed towards a gendered history of early modern espionage.

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.

Combining approaches from intellectual history, philology and the study of Arabic manuscripts, this study places the Bornu scholar Muḥammad al-Wālī within his intellectual environment on the one hand, and it portrays him as someone who responded to the concerns of ordinary Muslims around him on the…

An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Although migration and integration have become important concepts today as a result of globalization, migration movements, integration, and multiculturalism have always been part of the history of Europe. Few people realize how many ethnic groups participated in migration within Europe or into Europe…

This PhD subproject concentrates on 16th-century ichthyology and takes Gessner’s Historia piscium (1558) (further HP) as its point of departure and focus.

How did learned natural historical inquiries into the underwater world develop in eighteenth-century Europe?

This new volume, published 19 November 2020, - within the series 'Intersections' -, explores the concept of magnificence as a social construction in seventeenth-century Europe. Although this period is often described as the ‘Age of Magnificence’, thus far no attempts have been made to investigate how…

This research project problematizes the applicability of ballet within a contemporary choreographic practice.

Leiden-Yale collaboration uncovers a tale of samurai same-sex love in a library manuscript.

Tero Alstola defended his thesis on 21 December 2017

Fascinating images, articles of clothing and other unique objects from the past four centuries of the history of Leiden University can now be seen in the ‘Celebrating Curiosity’ exhibition in the hall of Rapenburg 70.

On December 12th, Andreas Krogull succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andreas on this great result.

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.

Modern receptions of Graeco-Roman Antiquity are important ideological markers of the ways we envisage our own twenty-first-century societies. An urgent topic of study is: what kinds of narratives – sometimes controversial – about Antiquity do people create for themselves at this moment in time, and…

A selected group of unpublished amulets from various collections in the world will be studied and edited.

On the 2nd of September Jiyan Qiao successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

What was the relationship between women and modern media in different parts of Asia in the 20th century? Under what historical and social conditions did women achieve prominence in popular music in Asia?