From the very beginning, the Islam has known an oral tradition. It was only two hundred years ago that Muslims starting writing about the history of Islam, on rocks or other hard materials. Arabic epigraphy (study of inscriptions) turns out to be an essential tool in historical genealogy research. Abdullah…

Hans Mol is Professor Emeritus by Special Appointment of Medieval Frisian History on behalf of the Fryske Akademy at the Leiden University Institute for History.

Dr.(mult.) Andrew DJ Shield is Assistant Professor of Migration History, and affiliated with the interdisciplinary research project “Social Citizenship and Migration.” He is the chair of Leiden’s LGBT+ Network. Shield specializes in sexuality, race, and diversity in Europe since 1945. He holds two…

Lydie Cabane, Assistant Professor in Governance of Crises at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, recently published the book The Government of Disasters. In this book Lydie explores how the South African state bureaucracy reacts to disasters.

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

In Poland the commemoration of acts of resistance is being misused to distort the history of the Holocaust. That is what Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski said in his inaugural lecture on 26 November. In her lecture, the second Cleveringa Professor, Barbara Engelking, pointed to the often indifferent…

Bart van der Boom is university lecturer at the Institute for History.

Miko Flohr is a lecturer in Ancient History studying the social and economic history of the Greco-Roman world, with a special interest in urban commerce and everyday work in Roman Italy, particularly in Pompeii, Ostia and Rome. Educated as a classicist, and with a Ph.D. in archaeology, he teaches on…

PhD defence

Aad van Mastrigt is an external PhD candidate at Leiden University and is working on a thesis entitled: 'Playing with identity: Is Chilean classism destabilizing due to the phenomenon of re-identification? (2002-2017)'

Lecture, Booklaunch - CoGloSS | Oosters Genootschap | Leiden University Press

The Healthy Society Programme (HSP) has selected five scale-up projects for a special acceleration grant, giving successful health initiatives the opportunity to be rolled out more widely across the province of South Holland. One of these projects is StartKracht, led by clinical psychologist Anika B…

Elisabeth Dieterman is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History.

Jacqueline Hylkema is Assistant Professor of Cultural History at Leiden University College and Senior Scaliger Fellow at Leiden University Libraries’ Scaliger Institute. Her research focuses on forgery in early modern print culture, particularly in the Dutch Republic and Britain. Hylkema is currently…

Göran Sundholm is a Professor of Philosophy of Mathematics and of Logic at the Institute for Philosophy.

Rieneke Sonnevelt is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies.

Rodrigo Ochigame is an assistant professor in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Their research examines unorthodox models of computational rationality, such as nonclassical logics from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines from India, and frameworks of…

Leonor Jonker (1987) is a historian, author, and artist. She was the scientific curator of an exhibition on the Namibian genocide at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (25 November 2016 - 12 March 2017).

The new Cluster Zuid building is progressing steadily. The glass roof over the atrium has been installed and the window frames are being fitted. The future locations of the offices and classrooms are also becoming increasingly visible. See Stijn Poelstra's photo report below.

In the Netherlands, when we talk about the United Nations, the conversation is almost always about the member states from the northern hemisphere. But the most interesting players come from the ‘Global South’, Professor Alanna O'Malley and her team argue in a podcast.

Four students of the Faculty of Archaeology investigated how the current and past inhabitants of the Dutch province of South Holland deal with water. Their findings now feature in an exhibition that can now be visited in the Van Steenis building’s Reuvenshal.

Alicia Schrikker is Professor of the History of the Netherlands in the World and Director of Research at the Leiden University Institute for History. She is an expert in the history and legacy of Dutch colonialism. She supervises BA, MA and PhD research in the fields of socio legal history, colonial…

Johan Visser is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History.

Ronald Petrarca is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History.

Henk den Heijer is Professor Emeritus in Maritime History at the Leiden University Institute for History (chair from 2010 to 2015).

Glenn is a researcher from Costa Rica that has developed his career in the sustainability field. He holds a bachelor degree in Chemistry from the University of Costa Rica and a master of Sustainability from the University of Sydney, Australia.

Professor Remco Breuker plays the leading role in the new documentary ‘Big in Korea’. Over three Sunday evenings, viewers can follow his journey through South Korea. How has the country developed over the past decades? And what is the impact of last December's failed coup?

Piercing through the skull with an ice pick, administering electric shocks without an anaesthetic, or applying leeches to the uterus: these may seem like medieval methods of torture, but they are in fact therapies used in medicine. Willem van der Does writes about all of them in his new book. ‘Physicians…

There has been good progress with the new South Cluster construction through the summer months. All the door and window frames are now in place, the building will soon be wind and watertight and the interior finishing has already begun. The work will be completed in the months ahead, with the building…

Bernhard Rieger is a Professor of European History at the institute for History.

Israel was ordered to take steps to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. Giulia Pinzauti, an expert on state conflicts and humanitarian law, explains the significance of the case, the specific details of the ruling and what we can expect to happen next.

In the book 'Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka' Nira Wickramasinghe, professor of Modern South Asian Studies, uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world. She was interviewed about the book in the New Books in South East Asian…

Anne Heyer is an Assistant Professor in modern history with a research interest in the ideas and practices of political participation in different European countries (1800-today). She works on political parties, populism, social movements and democracy in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Britain and Spain).…

For decades, the trade in pocketbooks prescribing how to be a good Muslim flourished in East Africa, but in recent years the number of books in circulation has been declining. University lecturer Annachiara Raia is the recipient of an Impact Explorer grant to revive this tradition, in cooperation with…

Maarja Seire is a PhD student at the Institute for Area Studies.

Anthropologist Marja Spierenburg talks in the Dutch newspaper NRC about the neoliberal system and how it has to change in order to solve the energy crisis in South-Africa.

Maurits Berger's new English-language podcast, Matters of Humanities: History of Islam in Europe covers no fewer than thirteen centuries of history. In eight episodes, professor of Islam and the West Maurits Berger argues that the Islam and Muslims are an important part of European history: ‘That was…