As Secretary General of the Royal Dutch Football Association, Gijs de Jong travels the world. The career of this Leiden public administration graduate tells the story of a petrol station attendant who became one of the top diplomats in Dutch football.

A portrait of the complex historical process of over 500 years of European colonialism in the New World.

This book examines the critical role of information and knowledge in early modern Europe's global pursuits, exploring challenges in trusting distant information, the development of doubt in intercultural encounters, and the impact of misinformation.

Are there general principles or values that should govern our actions as moral agents and/or as political subjects?

NTER-SECTION is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on contributions from junior archaeological researchers at Leiden University. The journal offers an accessible platform for the publication of individual research by undergraduate and graduate students. The Editorial Board consists of PhD…

Imagining the Americas in Print contains eleven essays, seven of which have been published before and four of which are new.

This book published by Oxford University Press discusses religion and trade in world history.

Bacteria caught red-handed, deeply frozen just as they were about to cause Lyme’s disease. Ariane Briegel is wildly enthusiastic about the wonders she observes thanks to three elements: a freezing technique, a camera-equipped microscope, and AI. ‘It’s fascinating. Every single cell is different.’

During the period 500–1000 CE Egypt was successively part of the Byzantine, Persian and Islamic empires. All kinds of events, developments and processes occurred that would greatly affect its history and that of the eastern Mediterranean in general. This is the first volume to map Egypt's position in…

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.

Sheltering is an immediate human need and determines well-being andhealth.

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world, when, how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities?

This project aims to excavate and date the setting of the east gate of the Roman fortress of Udhruḥ. This will be compared with other Diocletianic military installations from the region. We also hope to retrieve another gate inscription which can shed light on the function and political embedding of…

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…

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the magna carta of civil aviation, the Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention 1944), Professor Steven Truxal has written a leading piece for the European Civil Aviation Conference: The Chicago system: a steadfast legal blueprint for…

Carl Li defended his thesis on 30 June 2015

Machine Learning is becoming a more and more substantial technology for industry.

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

In early medieval England, there was an interest in the history of the Roman Empire and kings adopted such imperial titles as 'imperator' or 'basileus'. How can we explain this interest and what functions did imperial ideas and the reception of the classical world serve in early medieval England?

Today’s socio-economic challenges aren’t new. In the centuries after the retreat of the Roman state people with different backgrounds and with different ways of life somehow managed to build and maintain a complex economic system in northern Gaul that would produce the ruling dynasties of Europe. By…

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) was the first world empire in history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya - and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. This territorial sweep is both a source of fascination…

Is the legitimacy of law and governance of multilevel jurisdictions diminishing? What is the significance of (diminishing) legitimacy for the effectiveness of law? These kinds of questions about the legitimacy of the supranational formation of law, its application, and the policy and governance based…

Was the progressive colonial civil servant the precursor of the postcolonial development-aid worker?

While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is empty of essence (svabhava). How is constructive cultural…

This dissertation studies the construction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a cultural icon in American memory, particularly by FDR himself.

This 25th volume in the series 'Islam in Africa', edited by Annachiara Raia, is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state.

In this thesis it is posed that the central object of preference discovery is a co-creative process in which the Other can be represented by a machine. It explores efficient methods to enhance introverted intuition using extraverted intuition's communication lines.

On 9 June 2020, Maral Darouei defended her thesis 'Managing a sustainable career in the contemporary world of work: Personal choices and contextual challenges'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.I. van der Rest.

Archives were a common target during the Second World War, and hundreds suffered damages. Among these archival losses, the losses to medieval manuscript collections stand out.

The main question addressed in this thesis is how we can best conceive the contrast between a priori and empirical truths.

Migration is the talk of the town. On the whole, however, the current situation is seen as resulting from unique political upheavals. Such a-historical interpretations ignore the fact that migration is a fundamental phenomenon in human societies from the beginning and plays a crucial role in the cultural,…

Hot rocky exoplanets are planets that orbit so close to their host star that they possess a molten surface.

Promotor: Carel J. ten Cate, Co-Promotor: Hans W. Slabbekoorn

On Wednesday 3 September 2025 Yu Ai successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This book reveals how one publishing firm's editorial strategy helped to legitimate European colonialism in the early modern era.

This dissertation investigates how the efficiency of Computed Tomography (CT) can be improved for dynamic scientific and industrial applications.

What are best practices for teaching students to engage with 'wicked' problems?

Dr. Gruni published an article on the impact on sustainable development in the EU Common Commercial Policy of recent Opinion 2/15 CJEU on the Global Trade and Customs Journal.

On Friday 16 May Juul Eijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The project explores the impact of the clash between defenders of a rules-based order and international law on global governance and the future of legal systems.

The starting point of Hermans' research is how both children's physical play and dance improvisation by professionals can be considered somatic practices where sense-making manifests itself in and between bodies, and through movement.

The starting point of Hermans' research is how both children's physical play and dance improvisation by professionals can be considered somatic practices where sense-making manifests itself in and between bodies, and through movement.

Since 1974, World Environment Day has been celebrated every year on 5 June, engaging governments, businesses and citizens in an effort to address pressing environmental issues.

How do young adults find their way in an increasingly complex society? In Leiden, as part of the GUTS project, we study how brain development and self-regulation play a role in this process.

On August 27 – 31 2019, PhD candidate Maria Vasile participated in the IUAES 2019 Inter- congress in Poznan, Poland entitled "World Solidarities" and shares some of the insights from presentations she attended and found particularly relevant to the Food Citizens project.

Sonic Modernities situates Southeast Asian popular music in specific socio-historical settings, hoping that a focus on popular culture and history may shed light on how some people in a particular part of the world have been witnessing the emergence of all things modern.

On the 17th of December, Jin Wang successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jin on this achievement!

The work done during this PhD research, aims to investigate the effect of tidal heatingin the observability of extra-solar satellites around exoplanets.

America’s dominance of the world stage is coming to an end. These were the words of Professor Amitav Acharya in his guest lecture in The Hague on 5 February. ‘But the world really won’t be plunged into immediate chaos.’