For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…

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…

Promotor: Prof.dr. L.J. Slikkerveer

Embracing the Provinces is a collection of essays focused on people and their daily lives living in the Roman provinces, c. 27 BC-AD 476. It offers an overview of current research on Roman provinces and frontiers, deconstructing some long-held preconceptions and providing refreshing insights into unexplored…

Global Challenges is the research programme of the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

De Pagus Renensis van de 4de tot de 8ste eeuw na Chr.: Een archeologische synthese

On 12 April 2022 Alok Oak successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Intermediality, Media Practices and Media Literacy is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

Middle East Studies Lecture

Elizabeth Stuart is one the most misrepresented – and underestimated – figures of the seventeenth century. Daughter of James VI & I, she was married to Frederick V, Elector Palatine in 1613 – they were crowned King and Queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be deposed and exiled to the Dutch Republic in…

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

Since my master's thesis on the landed property of the Frisian monasteries in the Middle Ages I am highly interested in the do ut des-aspects of the relation between religious houses and the lay world. Key words here are: property, power, patronage and the role of religious institutions in the 'salvation…

Publication on the excavations at Roman fort Matilo in Leiden

Politics and Aesthetics is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

Muge Özoglu defended her dissertation on 5 December 2018

In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English…

Fish climbing trees, storks taking care of their parents… Premodern textual and visual culture presents us with a fabulous bestiary that reveals ingenious and rich reflections on the animal kingdom.

On the 12th of September, Lorenzo Nespoli successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Lorenzo on this achievement!

Prince, Pen, and Sword offers a synoptic interpretation of rulers and elites in Eurasia from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Four core chapters zoom in on the tensions and connections at court, on the nexus between rulers and religious authority, on the status, function, and self-perceptions…

Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political turmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens.

Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries and of his philosophy's rich…

The Archaeology of Consumption in the Eastern Mediterranean (ca. 500-1500)

On 14 November, Ilya Kokorin defended the thesis 'Intra-group financing and enterprise group insolvency: problems, principles and solutions'. The doctoral research was supervised by Matthias Haentjens and Reinout Vriesendorp.

This subproject examines how memories of flight and persecution shaped new social and religious identities in the Netherlands.

A comparative study in the History of Modern Philosophy focused on the recourse to physiology on the part of two key figures, Spinoza and Nietzsche.

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene?

Nuran Buket Cengiz defended her thesis on 13 June 2017

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

Mari Nakamura defended her thesis on 14 March 2017

The multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying artistic, literary, political and religious ideologies.

Tuna Kalaycı, ed. Archaeologies of Roads. 2023.

The academic staff of the Leiden University Institute for History.

Islam is a religion as well as a cultural practice that takes on a diversity of forms, some of them contradictory. This has always been the case, and it is becoming increasingly apparant in the modern world through migration, globalisation and the digitial media. The minor Islam: Religion and Society,…

To what extent can digital technologies be considered as authorities?

The relevance of intentionality to the interpretation of Aristotle was first suggested by Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Here we take our starting point from Brentano and investigate how Brentano’s concept of intentionality is rooted in Aristotle.

For thousands of years, societies have fallen under the reign of a single leader, ruling as chief, king, or emperor. In this fascinating global history of medieval and early modern dynastic power, Jeroen Duindam charts the rise and fall of dynasties, the rituals of rulership, and the contested presence…

Historicising Art and Literature is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

In his groundbreaking Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, Benedict Anderson argued that members of a community experience a

New perspectives from archaeology and ancient history

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…

“Winner CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award 2016” A Cultural History

ASLU (Archaeological Studies Leiden University) is a peer-reviewed book series produced by the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University.

On the 19th of April, Iris van de Voorde successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Iris on this achievement!

The Layered Heart : Essays on Persian Poetry is published in celebration of the poet and scholar Dick Davis, dubbed “our pre-eminent translator from Persian” by The Washington Post.

Hekmat Dirbas defended his thesis on 14 February 2017

On the 23rd of June Arianna Sacco successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This book covers the story of Greece and its central role in our understanding of European civilization, from the Palaeolithic era (400,000 BP) to the early modern period (1950 AD).

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…

This volume considers the military architecture and its impact on local communities in Rome's eastern frontier, which stretched from the north-east shore of the Black Sea to the Red Sea.