This year’s “best master’s thesis in the area of national or international history” was written by Bareez Majid, who has completed a research master's in Middle Eastern Studies. She wins the prestigious 2015 Volkskrant–IISG thesis prize for her courageous, solid research on a former “torture prison”…

Quietly read a book in our new reading nook, listen to interesting and bizarre stories set in early twentieth-century Leiden, walk past literary locations in Leiden and watch the best film adapted from a Leiden novel as decided on by you. April is Literary Leiden month! A month in which we pay special…

In this article, Dimiter Toshkov investigates the determinants of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and refusal, focusing on Eastern, Southern and Western Europe.

From Persia and Arabia to North Africa: as early as the nineteenth century, there were Dutch people who used the camera themselves in various regions of the Middle East.

Middle Paleolithic stone tool technology is one of the major sources of information about Neandertal behavior and adaptations. The Balkan Middle Paleolithic often remains outside of the major debates and interpretations of Neandertal behavior.

This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context.

Band 69 | 2014

After an initial suggestion of a move toward Israel, India’s Prime Minister Modi has signaled a significant recalibration of his government’s engagement with the Middle East region. Now, India seems to be prioritising strong ties with the Gulf states.

The basic concern that informs every part of the research is in wonder of what happens when sound happens as an aesthetic force. The emphasis of each query lies on the active occasion, the radical empiricism, the moment of encounter, how the sonic event comes to pass as aesthetic force.

Political Islam is not new to the Middle East, but the appearance of ISIS has stretched the phenomenon to the extreme.

On Friday 2 October journalist Sander van Hoorn starts his lecture series ‘The Middle East doesn't exist’, which was organised by the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). ‘If all goes well, people will understand the Middle East that bit less after my lectures.’

This project investigates the causes of the major archaeological change in the period of 40.000-20.000 BC in South Africa.

On Tuesday 30 April 2024 Jonny Russell successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Hekmat Dirbas defended his thesis on 14 February 2017

In my research I am concerned with the possibility of a politics of sexuality without reverting to identitarian conceptions of sexuality. In a reading of the work of the American author James Purdy, I propose to move towards a politicizing of the concept of narrative identity as developed by the French…

The NWO-funded research project ‘The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders, c. 1200- c. 1500’ is hosting a series of e-workshops on the topic of ‘Multilingual Literary Cultures in the Middle Ages’. The program is now available online.

The narrow but long stretched stript of Frisian land along the North Sea was already occupied before Roman times. However, man repeatedly suffered setbacks when he tried to extend his living space, both in the tidal marshes and the peat area south of them.

On Thursday 21 November 2024 Jake Benson successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The subject of motherhood is interwoven with themes of survival, power and identity. It is also at the heart of any consideration of women’s writing. Conversations of Motherhood sensitively charts common themes, intersecting experiences and related topics within the cultural specificities of South African…

In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this project inquires: Which early modern vices persisted into the 19th century and to what extent were those vices embodied in anecdotes, conveyed through commonplaces, or symbolically…

Subproject of

De lichtheid van literatuur: Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (The Lightness of Literature: Engagement in the Multicultural Society) is a plea for the social relevance of literature. The book delves into an age-old debate about literature and social engagement, which has recently been reinvigorated…

Nobuaki Murai defended his thesis on 24 January 2018.

What kinds of vocal music were not typically transmitted in written musical notation? Can specific ‘lost’ song forms - siciliane, giustiniane, le Grechesche, gli stili “regionali“ nel canto del quattrocento - be more precisely identified than they have been until now, both in musicological research…

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

The Middle Ages are becoming increasingly more popular: just look at the popularity of such ‘medievalist’ TV series as Game of Thrones and Vikings, and let’s not forget popular re-enactments of medieval battles. Leiden University is home to many specialists of this fascinating period and this new blog…

In this article, Antoaneta Dimitrova and others explore what motivates protesters in Central and Eastern Europe.

This special issue of Contemporary Levant critically explores, at a micro and macro level, the structural role and religious, cultural and political interactions of the Greek-Orthodox, Melkite and Syriac communities in late Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine.

On 1 April 2020, Ivan Romashchenko defended his thesis 'Related Party Transactions and Corporate Groups: When Eastern Europe Meets the West'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. S.M. Bartman en Prof. A. Radwan (Kaunas, Lithuania).

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).

Haunting the future through poetry

Iraqi-Kurdish student of Middle Eastern Studies Bareez Majid has been nominated for the ECHO Award. ‘She has a strong personality, though she may appear unassuming at first,’ was the comment from one of her lecturers.

Ali Al Tuma, PhD candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History, has won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity for his play ‘Yusuf Melik Espanya’ (Yusuf King of Spain), that tells the story of a young Moroccan whose brothers conspire to send him off, against his will, to the Spanish Civil…

Leiden scholars study clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. But what exactly does the cuneiform script say?

With the help of the JEDI fund, Fatima al Moufridji and Thijs Porck went in search of cultural contacts between early medieval England, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Together they made four knowledge clips that can now be seen on YouTube.

The project focuses on an intriguing aspect of André Chénier’s poetry, which has not received much attention in scholarship: Chénier’s indebtedness – in the form of translation, adaptation, borrowing, reference – to Hellenistic poetry; it interprets the role of this indebtedness in his poetical and…

Counter-Discourse in Zimbabwean Literature is a study of specific aspects of counter-discursive Zimbabwean narratives in English. In discussing the selected texts, my thesis is based on Terdiman’s (1989) the postcolonial concept of counter-discourse.

'Consider languages in their shared context.' That is the message of Professor and Arabist Beatrice Gründler, who will receive an honorary doctorate from Leiden University on 8 February. ‘I would like people to learn that Arabic history has a close connection with Europe.’

Leiden University recently named a new building for Egyptologist Herta Mohr. But who was she?