The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

Many lecturers aim to make their courses more diverse, but they often encounter problems in the process. How can they receive the information they need? This project ‘Wanted: roadmap’ develops a roadmap for Dutch (academic) historians to bring diversity into practice. BA1 teaching in Graeco-Roman history…

What are the humanities? As the cluster of disciplines historically grouped together as “humanities” has grown and diversified to include media studies and digital studies alongside philosophy, art history and musicology to name a few, the need to clearly define the field is pertinent.

In a podcast episode of 'The Dissenter' Eric Storm talks about his book 'Nationalism: A World History'.

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…

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

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,…

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

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.

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

Visiting Researchers at the Leiden University Institute for History

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…

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you think of squatting, the picture that comes to mind is of young people occupying derelict buildings in big cities. Leiden also has a history of squatting, and that history is very diverse.

‘Islam and Muslims are not something that happened to Europe; they are part of Europe. In fact, Islam is one the biggest constants in European history,’ argues Professor Maurits Berger in the new eight-part History of Islam in Europe podcast series of the Leiden University Faculty of Humanities.

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

In educational settings such as museums, universities and schools, white, male, able-bodied and rational subjects still dominate. Although there has been a lot of theoretical work on processes of in- and exclusion through racialization, sexualization, and disabilization, we still know very little about…

Histories Connected: Seminar

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This project will construct an inventory of possible conceptions of the resistance of the world to scientists’ claims and theories.

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

This special issue of Media History (22-3/4, 2016), co-edited with Helmer Helmers (University of Amsterdam), develops a new perspective on the early modern communication revolution. It discusses news as a specific kind of information – by its nature continuous, unreliable, and diffuse – which needed…