Matthias Lukkes is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for History, working on the project Revisiting the Invention of Africa, 1590-1720. His research focuses on Dutch imaginations of Africa in the long seventeenth century and how these shaped a shared European understanding of African alterity.

Conference

In February 2015 Lauren Lauret started her PhD project titled 'Meeting practices of the Dutch States General and the continuity of the early modern world of the political (1780-1848)' at the Institute for History, supervised by prof. H. te Velde.

Women confined to the kitchen? Not in Scheveningen around 1900. There, some women ran entire shipping companies. This is according to new research by history student Sjors Stuurman. He compiled the results in a book he wrote for Muzee Scheveningen.

Ever since Nadine Akkerman, Professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture, came across a woman spy in her research, secret agents have kept cropping up in her work. Now there’s Spycraft, a popular history book exploring the espionage techniques used by early modern spies, which she has co-written with…

Olli Littunen is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Area Studies.

Lecture, This Time for Africa series

With a recently published major research project and an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, the struggle for independence in Indonesia has been thrusted back into the spotlight. Leiden University is devoting attention to this topic as well. History students Sander van der Horst and Melle van Maanen joined…

What hidden nature is there in our cities and how can we use such organisms? This is what the HiddenBiodiversity project will be exploring over the next four years. The project’s kick-off meeting was held at the Hortus botanicus on Monday 26 September.

On February 28th of this year Dr. Andrzej Tadeusz Antczak died of cancer after a long battle. Until his retirement in 2023 Andrzej was attached to the Faculty of Archaeology as an Associate Professor in Caribbean Archaeology. From 2017 until 2020 he was the Head of the Department of World Archaeology,…

In August 2014 Stefano Bellucci started working as Senior Lecturer in African History at the Institute for History.

After the May elections a new University Council has now taken seat. The university democracy is the result of the long-lived national student protests in 1969. Students from Leiden joined the protests for greater representation, although their actions were less revolutionary than at other universities.…

Dennis Bos is University Lecturer at the Institute for History.

Lecture, Global Questions Seminar

Rik van Gijn is professor by special appointment of ethnolinguistic vitality and diversity in the world at the Centre for Linguistics. His interests focus on the indigenous languages of South America, and in particular on the question of the historical development of the stunning linguistic diversity…

Research on Asian plants is his life's work. Now a crown is added to that: a plant from the coffee family bearing his name. Paul Kessler is LUF professor of botanical gardens and botany of South East Asia and Scientific Director of the Hortus botanicus. 'Completely unexpectedly, you get to see the results…

In the Spanish town of Guadalajara, there is a street named ‘Burgemeester Fluiterstraat’, named after a descendant of Leiden migrants who had done well in the South. He was not the only Guadalajara resident with Leiden roots: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a stream of Dutch textile workers…

I am interested in the decoloniality of Islamic studies, particularly in thinking through epistemic diversity in the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe. To that end, I am currently taking the Islamic idea of beauty (jamal) as starting point to reconceptualize Muslim subjectivity, studying how Muslims…

Liselore Tissen (Ph.D.) is a postdoctoral researcher at LUCAS and is affiliated with Delft University of Technology (Mechanical Engineering), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science. She is the task lead for ethics, digital research,…

Lecture, Annual Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture

The History programme has been working for several years to make the curriculum more diverse and inclusive. With a Comenius grant, university lecturer Kim Beerden wants to take the next step.

Film screening

Lecture

Often landscape restoration is seen as a quick technical fix, when a long-term and more sensitive approach is necessary. Within her PhD research, conducted over the past five years in South Africa, Ancois de Villiers explored how we can change this approach. ‘A damaged ecosystem can’t be "fixed" in…

Showing your face at dinners and parties at court: it was the way to get noticed by the king in William I's time. Joost Welten's latest book reveals how, during the reign of William I, the elite danced around his throne both literally and figuratively.

Lecture, COGLOSS lecture