The SRON space research institute, Leiden University and the TU Delft are appointing six researchers to jointly carry out space research. The research will focus on exoplanets, the evolution of structure in the Universe and technology for developing new pioneering space instruments.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

In September, the Una Europa ELSEA project, Enhancing Scholarship in Eastern Africa, officially started. Now that the project has been running for a couple of months, it’s high time to check in and see how the project is going.

Conducting research on reliability of journalism and the trust in media.

University Lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe discusses on The Conversation how Trump's Greenland proposal overlooks the historical discrimination faced by Indigenous Alaskans.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

This book explores how changes in the patterns of cooperation and conflict among states, regional actors and transnational non-state actors have affected the rise of emerging global powers and the suggested decline of US leadership. Scholars, students and policy practitioners who are interested in the…

Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria - South Africa

How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project…

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…

Archaeologist Dr Gerrit Dusseldorp's research project was covered by a South African newspaper. Dusseldorp and his team investigate the evolution of human behaviour through artefacts dug up in South African caves.

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

Within the scope of innovating and connecting – the theme of our new Strategic Plan – I paid a visit to Brussels last week. It is important to give Leiden University a face in Brussels and to show our expertise, on Africa for instance.

Van Vollenhoven Lecture 2025

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.

Leiden’s expertise on the Middle East spans from ancient history to contemporary tensions in the region. By studying languages, cultures, religions, literature, art, and philosophy in in conjunction, we create an indispensable, in-depth understanding.

A newly opened museum in China appears to be devoted to the origins of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, who some 5000 years ago spread from East Asia across the Pacific, seeding it with a distinctive culture and some 1200 languages. But those displays are also a statement in the long-running dispute…

The historiography of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is dominated by the personal clash between the principal negotiators, Harry Dexter White of the United States and John Maynard Keynes of Britain.

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

Regulating Relations: Controlling Sex and Marriage

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University proudly establishes the Blaise Pascal chair. The chair applies for one year and is meant to strengthen the cooperation of the Leiden computer science research with foreign institutes.

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

In this project we ask: how does pollution manifest as part of different practices, both socially and materially.

From the First World War until the height of the Cold War, actors from the decolonizing world sought to build connections with international peace movements. These efforts produced new networks and practices of solidarity while also exposing tensions over the centrality of decolonization in global struggles…

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?

The new blog Afro-Asian Visions showcases new and ongoing research on Afro-Asian interactions through networks of artists, intellectuals, technical experts, and activists. It is designed as an online magazine.

The European Research Council (ERC) announced the awarding of 494 Starting Grants to young scientists across Europe. One of these scholars is Corinna Jentzsch, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science. She received this grant for her research project ‘Countering…

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

On 15 February 2022, Irma Mosquera Valderrama, Professor of Tax Governance, holder of the EU Jean Monnet Chair on EU Tax Governance EUTAXGOV and Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project GLOBTAXGOV, participated in the High-Level Webinar Taxation and Business in Africa.

During the project, this page will be updated with news updates and events organised as part of the research project.

In 1960, not one but 17 African countries became independent. Sixty years later the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) is offering a wide programme to mark this celebration. African Studies itself proved to be a topic of conversation at the kick-off conference on 30 January.

North Korea may seem like an isolated country but it has strong ties with African regimes. This alliance, which trades in arms despite international sanctions, is increasingly operating out of the liberal world order’s sight, PhD candidate Tycho van der Hoog warns.

The second major collection of papers from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

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…

The emergence of the Köprülü household that imprinted its stamp on the latter half of the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire. What is the power struggle they carried out against Ottoman dynastic power?

Online, hybrid, on campus... It was an unpredictable year, also for the Faculty of Humanities. Luckily, there were also non-corona related stories. Let's review 2021 with this list of the most-read news articles per month.

Is it possible to formulate a new conceptual foundation for attributing an evaluative role to historiography of science, without relinquishing the historiographic sensitivity of recent work in the discipline?

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' analyzes Greek economic thinking in late 5th- and 4th-century philosophical circles.

The VVI seeks to develop and disseminate socio-legal knowledge and theory regarding the interaction between law, governance and society. More specifically, the Institute studies the emergence, functioning, and evolution of legal institutions.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Liu Puning defended his thesis on 25 April 2018.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Bordering Up: Regulating Mobility Through Passes, Walls and Guards

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.