Warja Tolstoj, alumna Art History, has been awarded the 2021 edition of the Ted Meijerprijs. Named after the former director of the KNIR (Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome), the prize is awarded yearly to the best MA/ReMa thesis or PhD in the Humanities.

Since 1 February 2016, Paul van Trigt is postdoctoral researcher in the project Rethinking Disability: the Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Global Perspective at the Institute for History.

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…

Three years ago, Associate Professor Alicia Schrikker published 'De vlinders van Boven-Digoel', in which she chronicled several stories about colonial life in present-day Indonesia. Now there is a translation, by Rianti Manullang, who is also an assistant professor at Universitas Indonesia and doing…

Who assembled the collections of museums? The answer to this question seems to point to men as collectors. Apart from for rare exceptions, female collectors hardly seem to exist. Yet there were indeed women collectors. For the project Museums, Collections and Society, researcher Holly O'Farrell will…

The Leiden municipality wants to make the city centre climate-proof and combat heat stress by greening it. But they want to do this in a way that does justice to the city’s heritage. Researcher Fenna IJtsma delves into historical greenery to offer inspiration.

Children who lost their fathers in early modern England ran the risk of being sold to the highest bidder. Although Shakespeare wrote about it in his plays, the practice disappeared from collective memory for a long time. University lecturer Lotte Fikkers is bringing it back to light in a new Vidi research…

An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore. Archaeologist Alex Brandsen has now used deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to develop a search engine…

Education

On October 26, Gianclaudio Malgieri (Associate professor at eLaw) moderated a plenary panel about "Blockchain and Metaverse: Privacy and Data Protection" at the 44th Global Privacy Assembly in Istanbul, the biggest world institutional conference about privacy and data protection.

Dutch troops, judges and politicians collectively condoned and concealed the systematic use of extreme violence during the Indonesian War of Independence. Historians have now shown how this could happen. ‘It was scandal management rather than prevention,’ says Leiden historian and research leader Gert…

The touring exhibition 'Presenting with the city' has touched down in the Lipsius Building. In the presentation, students and researchers show how their research has contributed to the city.

Acquiring external funding for research is becoming increasingly important. Proper support for applying for research grants is essential in this process. As of December, the team of the Meijers Research Institute, responsible for the organisation and quality assurance of research at our faculty, will…

Leiden University Libraries has been elected to the Executive Committee of the IIIF Consortium. The term of office is two years starting from January 2022.

The Van Vollenhoven Institute is organising a year-long public lecture series entitled 'Reconsidering the Socio-Legal Gaze'. The lecture series aims to spark critical debates about the visions of justice and positions of power that inform Law and Society scholarship at Leiden and beyond.

A useful hands-on guide to preprints is now available for researchers. It provides anwers to some urgent questions. What are preprints? What are the advantages and disadvantages to posting preprints? What are the implications for (my) research?

Elizabeth Hicks won first runner-up in the Netherlands Institute of the Near East (NINO) MA thesis 2021 competition at the end of January.

In 2024, Professor Joanita Vroom received a substantial grant from the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) in support for her Hinterlands of Medieval Chalcis Project (HMC Project) in Greece. PHI, a California-based non-profit organization, is dedicated to archaeological research as well as to the preservation…

Wim Voermans en Annemarie Drahmann namen op 13 februari deel aan het Rondetafelgesprek van de commissie Binnenlandse Zaken over de uitvoering van de Wet open overheid. De kernvraag van de bijeenkomst was de vraag 'Wat gaat goed en wat kan beter bij de uitvoering van de Wet open overheid?'

To foster interfaculty collaborations and explore common ground for working interdisciplinary on health-related themes in Leiden and beyond, the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network has been set up.

Last July, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Minister of Education, Culture and Science and Annetje Ottow, President of Leiden University's Executive Board, opened the new front office of the Leiden University office in Jakarta. The office - located on the grounds of the Dutch embassy - has a dual role. Firstly, it…

Mehmet Kentel has been named co-winner of the prize, which is given out yearly by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, for his article “Ruin and Knowledge in Pera: Discovering Istanbul’s Genoese Heritage at the Moment of Its Destruction,” which was published in the fortieth-anniversary volume…

Education, Research

The MA International Relations program at Leiden University convened a roundtable forum at Leiden University The Hague Campus to examine the international and domestic stakes of Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest and detention under an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant.

In the nationalist nineteenth century, people developed an interest in medieval language and literature. The study of medieval material in one’s own vernacular was thought to reveal a great national past. But why, then, was Old English studied by Germans, Danes, Italians and many other nationalities…

In May 2022 Lennart Kruijer succesfully defended his PhD, which he wrote as a member of the VICI Project ‘Innovating Objects’, led by prof. Miguel John Versluys. So succesfully, in fact, that he was awarded the Cum Laude honors. Just a short time later he was awarded a grant and a fellowship to further…

Theft, prostitution, fortune-telling or murder. Historian Manon van der Heijden and a group of students are researching court records from The Hague from 1600 to 1800. They are tracing crimes and offenders and shedding new light on The Hague’s Gevangenpoort (or Prison Gate). Among their many discoveries…

Fadly Rahman and Marleen Reichgelt recently joined the Institute for History within the NWO-funded project 'Epistemic actors. The role of Indonesians in the making of knowledge in the colonial era’ under the supervision of Fenneke Sysling. Below, they introduce themselves.

Floris de Ruiter recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate, as part of Carolien Stolte's VIDI project 'Peace Palms. International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization, 1918-1970'. The project runs alongside Carolien Stolte's ERC project 'Reconciling Peace: International…

The exhibition Leiden celebrates – 450 years of parades at Museum De Lakenhal shows how parades and society have changed through the centuries. Alumnus and historian Danielle van Goethem worked on the exhibition. She gives a preview.

What do you do when you’re suddenly given access to a whole lot of data but don’t know how to organise and analyse it? Maritime historians in the Faculty of Humanities joined forces with vocational college (MBO) students to build a database. ‘We’re so compatible with each other.’

A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: a number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. The original manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the Norman Conquest.

Eline Westra recently joined the Institute for History as a postdoctoral researcher in the NWA-funded project 'Dilemmas of Doing Diversity', under the supervision of Marlou Schrover. Below, she introduces herself.

How do we account for historical power dynamics when writing new histories of slavery and emancipation? What critical methods can we employ when studying preserved archives and collections? A new book series aims to address these questions. The initiators Karwan Fatah-Black and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms…

Nowadays they can cause the fall of ministers, but once upon a time receipts were a new phenomenon. Associate Professor Robert Stein is to receive a grant from NIAS to map their origins.

Help us develop and expand the recently established Leiden Chinese Queer Collection (LCQC, 莱顿华语酷儿文献收藏) at Leiden University Libraries (UBL).

Rebekka Grossmann awarded Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship for research on the effects of migration on visual codes of global solidarity

Lionel Laborie recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in Early Modern History (18th Century). He introduces himself.

Last July saw the start of the new master programme Cosmopolis Advanced, an initiative of the Institute for History at Leiden University in partnership with Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta. The Cosmopolis Advanced programma, led by prof.dr. Jos Gommans and coordinator dr. Lennart Bes, provides…

Mohammad Bin Khidzer recently joined the Institute for History as a Postdoc, as part of Fenneke Sysling's ERC Starting Grant project COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia. Below he introduces himself.

Sophie Rose is one of the fellows of the Ammodo Science Fellowship 2024. She will use this fellowship to conduct research at Leiden University.

While humanities once mainly involved books and archives, nowadays we can’t imagine life without AI. Next semester a new faculty-wide course will be introduced, taking you along with this development. University lecturer and course coordinator Yann Ryan tells us more about it.

Andrea Cortellari, a 2020 graduate of the MA program in Middle Eastern Studies at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, wins the best MA thesis prize by the Society for Turkic, Ottoman, and Turkish Studies.

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.

Japanese newspapers, photo archives from the Dutch East Indies or information on gender and sexuality: all these can be found in the University Library's 621 humanities databases. A flyer campaign to raise awareness of them begins this week.

A lecturer winning a prize, an expert appearing in the media or a professor giving their inaugural speech: these are faces we often see. But we rarely see the staff who work behind the scenes to make their work possible. They are now featured in the photo exhibition ‘The forces behind the faces’.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Argentina faced a severe dictatorship. The regime did not shy away from using brute force and torture. People who showed their dissatisfaction also regularly disappeared. For her PhD, Ana Saab researched how the memory of these disappeared people was kept alive anyway.

Mike Schmidli has been awarded a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). From September 2021, he will spend 5 months at NIAS working on his research project titled 'Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and U.S. Interventionism in the late Cold War'. Read the abstract of his…

In het onderzoek van docent Martijn Nouwen wordt voor het eerst aan het grote publiek blootgelegd hoe de ‘geheime’ Europese Gedragscodegroep er niet in is geslaagd om verschillende vormen van schadelijke belastingconcurrentie uit te bannen.

Jessica den Oudsten won this year’s Uitgeverij Verloren/Johan de Witt thesis award for history with her master’s thesis, entitled "The descendants of Norwegian and Danish Immigrants". The prize was awarded for the eighth time in collaboration with Elsevier Weekblad. The incentive award went to Amber…