Language evolution, targeted drugs or archaeological interpretation. Researchers are making increasing use of supercomputers that can rapidly process large quantities of data. This is one reason why the University data centre will be extended and updated. ‘Datamining means we can get a better picture…

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

The representation of death children in Dutch literature through time

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

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural…

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural…

On the 15th of July Sawako Takemura successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The “harpe organisée”, 1720-1840: Rediscovering the lost pedal techniques on harps with a single-action pedal mechanism, is the title of Maria Christina Cleary's PhD thesis. This is the first monographic study on harp pedal techniques, tracing the historical way to pedal on the early pedal harps with…

This project proceeds from the observation that since the second half of the twentieth century, forgiveness and reconciliation have become pervasive themes in western culture, both on a political level and in personal relations.

This collection of essays is the first to compare the emergence and development of these different types of regional identities.

On the 12th of May, Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta on this achievement.

In this dissertation, a comprehensive portrait of the American-born Quaker Lindley Murray (1745–1826) is painted and the influence of Murray’s Quakerism on his language use is investigated by analyzing a corpus of 262 of his unpublished private letters.

This research project problematizes the applicability of ballet within a contemporary choreographic practice.

The historical archaeology of the Port of Sandy Point and its anchorage, St. Kitts, West Indies

Ineke Smit defended her thesis on 17 September 2019

This monograph by Robert Ross provides a detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century.

The Effects of the 1881 Liquor Act on the Leiden Alcohol Trade

This project explores themes at the intersection of maritime history and environmental history by looking at the problems Dutch ships encountered in the different climates of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and the solutions they could provide.

This study offers a new view on public services in the early modern Low Countries and answers the following questions: who provided public facilities in urban communities and in which ways did public amenities change in the period between 1500 and 1800?

This PhD project investigates how nationalist ideas are expressed, shaped, and negotiated in Moroccan Malhun poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On Thursday 10 April 2025 Wahyu Widodo successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Our team is committed to the study of knowledge in its broadest sense, encompassing both ideas and practices in all its historical variety. We look at what people regarded as knowledge, how they created, collected, circulated and used it, also why it mattered to them, and how all this was embedded 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 project investigates the professionalisation of university libraries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the lens of the medieval manuscript holdings. Taking Leiden University Library as a starting point, it sheds light on the changing practices surrounding the conservation,…

The nineteenth century truly was an age of transformation. Throughout Europe processes of industrialization and urbanization, nationalization and centralization, changed the structures of society. It was an age in which the number of people living in urban communities grew substantially.

Since 2019, the Foundation for Austrian Studies organises an annual lecture in cooperation with the Institute for History.

Making extensive use of primary source materials this study contributes to existing scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century grammars and grammarians by providing an in-depth study of Ash’s Grammatical Institutes and its influence on other popular grammars for children.

On 30 October 2020, Armin Cuyvers was invited to give the inaugural lecture of the European Legal Studies Centre of the Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta.

Joni Reef was among those present at the opening of Expertise Centre KIND in 's-Hertogenbosch on Thursday 22 November 2018. She spoke to Dutch newspaper Brabants Dagblad afterwards.

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Within the next five years, Leiden University wants its campus in The Hague to become a leading international academic centre with research and teaching that correspond with the city’s profile. All of the faculties will help achieve this, and the University has also signed a partnership agreement with…

Leiden University and the Municipality of Leiden will develop new plans for an alternative Humanities Campus in the city centre. This means they will not proceed with the compulsory purchase of the De Doelen housing complex to facilitate the construction of the new Humanities Campus. The plans to demolish…

On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, the Hazelhoff Centre for Financial Law will organize a conference on ‘Public and private regulation of financial markets’ on 11 May 2017.

Preparations for receiving 123 refugees in the University Sport Centre have been in full swing for several days. The large sports hall will be transformed into a dormitory, and a living and dining area. There will also be two recreation areas, one for adults and one for children.

Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past?

This book, edited by Joost Augusteijn, Constant Hijzen and Mark Leon de Vries, explores how democratic regimes have dealt with anti-democratic forces in society, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.

This collaborative research group (CRG) facilitates the synergies of researchers engaged with African languages and documentation of texts conducted in East Africa, paying particular attention to ‘endangered archives’ and ‘endangered languages’.

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

Welcome to the Graduate School of the Faculty of Humanities.

Building cultures of legality: lawmaking and anxiety in the office of the Governor General.

Victorian Fairy Tales

The Leiden Institute of History approaches early modern and modern European history from comparative and transnational perspectives.

Traces of a Colourful Past

How can we explain the popularity of the Spanish comedia nueva in the seventeenth-century theatre scene of the Low Countries?

Age of Rogues is a study of the frontier cultures of revolution that shaped the making of the modern Middle East. Rebels, revolutionaries, and racketeers played central roles in the violent process of imperial disintegration as it unfolded in the frontiers of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov, and Qajar…

Research Network Institute for History 2026-2029

The University's childcare centre, de Kattekop, has been awarded the 2017 Regional Award by South Holland. In an independent survey, parents gave the centre an exceptional score of 9.4,.