The MA in History, Arts and Culture of Asia is designed for students interested in taking a humanities-related approach to the study of countries or regions in pre-modern, modern or contemporary Asia.

This book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. It contains seven articles on the global panoramic visual history from the early modern to modern times and Istanbul's place within this history.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

Migration is an important topic of academic, public and political debate. Migration research generates a wealth of articles. The Journal of Migration History (JMH) is the first to specialize in the field. Articles on migration history either appear in journals that specialize on current issues, or in…

In a modernist interpretation of migration controls, nation states play a major role. This book challenges this interpretation by showing that comprehensive migration checks and permanent border controls appeared much earlier, in early modern dynastic states and empires, and predated nation states by…

Are you thinking about studying Arts and Culture: Art History and Museum Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Visiting Researchers at the Leiden University Institute for History

This study aims to provide a long time perspective of human landscape manipulation. Studying the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems is of great importance to establish the character of past 'natural' landscapes and to enhance the management of current ones.

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

What does it mean to live in an era of ‘posts’? At a time when ‘post-truth’ is on everyone’s lips, this volume seeks to uncover the logic of post-constructions – postmodernism, post-secularism, postfeminism, post-colonialism, post-capitalism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-tradition, post-Christian,…

This volume examines how the history of the humanities might be written through the prism of scholarly personae, understood as time- and place-specific models of being a scholar.

This project investigates the rich linguistic history of the crucial language groups in East Africa and includes a search for words that indicate earlier lost languages. These outcomes, combined with recent archaeological and genetic research, will contribute to a new understanding of East Africa’s…

In A History of Plague in Java, 1911–1942, Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk demonstrates how the official response to the 1911 outbreak of plague in Malang led to one of the most invasive health interventions in Dutch colonial Indonesia.

Which plants in the Mediterranean garden were already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and how were they utilized?

Carsten Stahn has just published Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities and Access to Culture. The book is part of the OUP Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Series.

Are you thinking about studying Politics, Culture and National Identities, 1789 to the Present? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

It recently emerged that a Swiss firm secretly owned by the CIA and the West German intelligence service BND had been selling manipulated coding equipment to numerous governments, including allies, to spy on them through a Swiss cover firm for years.

Speeches and speech acts have been crucial in settling the question at the centre of every political debate: who gets what, when and where?

This work analyzes ritual practices and knowledge related to the Mesoamerican calendar with the aim of contributing to the understanding of the use and conceptualization of this calendar system in the contemporary K’iche’ community of Momostenango, in the Highlands of Guatemala.

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors.

Promotor: P. T. de Zeeuw, Co-promotor: N. Neumayer; G. van de Ven