What is the history of the humanities? What does this new field look like? How does it relate to the history of science or to the history of individual disciplines (linguistics, history, media studies)? And how can you participate?

World History — a Genealogy charts the history of the discipline through twenty-five in-depth conversations with historians whose work has shaped the field of world history in fundamental ways.

Leiden’s Institute for History has an exceptionally strong expertise in premodern European history in its global context, with specialists whose interests cover virtually the whole continent.

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…

Why does the history of dogmatism deserve our attention? This open access book analyses uses of the term, following dogmatism from Victorian Britain to Cold War America, examining why it came to be regarded as a vice, and how understandings of its meaning have evolved.

This book provides an exploration into the historical transformations of women's interactions with state police in the Western world from 1800 to 1950.

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.

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.

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…

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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 studies the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems to establish the character of past “natural” landscapes and enhance the management of current ones.

How is vegetative development regulated in plants and how does this affect a plant’s life history strategy?

In this paper, Kantorowicz aims to track the persistent effect of former partitioning borders on property tax rates in Poland.

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.

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

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

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…

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