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 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 is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

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

Would you like to do collection-oriented research, but do not have sufficient resources? Every year, the Museums, Collections and Society (MCS) research group makes several research scholarships available for this purpose. Researchers Elizabeth den Hartog and Marika Keblusek previously received an MCS…

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…

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

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.

Since February 2020 Wim van den Doel is Dean of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) Universities, a strategic alliance of Leiden University, TU Delft, and Erasmus University Rotterdam and professor at the three connected universities.

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,…

Robert Stein is a senior university lecturer at the Institute for History.

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

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

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.

Lennart Bes is Assistant Professor at the Institute for History.

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

Edmund Hayes gained his doctorate with honors from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He works on early Islamic history, in particular Shiʿi history, focusing on the intersection of intellectual developments and social and political dynamics. He…

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…

Dr.(mult.) Andrew DJ Shield is Assistant Professor of Migration History, and affiliated with the interdisciplinary research project “Social Citizenship and Migration.” He is the chair of Leiden’s LGBT+ Network. Shield specializes in sexuality, race, and diversity in Europe since 1945. He holds two…

Pieter Slaman is Leiden University's university historian, with support of the A.E. Cohen Foundation. He is also a specialist in the history of education. His book ‘De glazen Toren. De Leidse Universiteit 1970-2020’ covered the institutional and cultural developments at Leiden university since the 1…

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

Joost Augusteijn is Senior University Lecturer at the Institute for History and Programme Chair of the BA International Studies and the Joint MA European Politics and Society.

Nira Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

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.

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.

Lionel Laborie is assistant professor at the Institute for History.

Bart van der Boom is university lecturer at the Institute for History.

Miko Flohr is a lecturer in Ancient History studying the social and economic history of the Greco-Roman world, with a special interest in urban commerce and everyday work in Roman Italy, particularly in Pompeii, Ostia and Rome. Educated as a classicist, and with a Ph.D. in archaeology, he teaches on…

This research will investigate which aspects of On the sublime received attention in the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century and how the sublime found its way in the political and artistic discourse of that time. Thus I aim to shed light on the role of art in politics and society in this…

This project will clarify how these concepts operated in theoretical writings on performance ,this broadened conceptual framework will not only give us a clear view on how sublime effects in performance were theorized, it will also provide us a concrete apparatus to understand the cultural and political…

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.

Catia Antunes is a Professor of History of Global Economic Networks at the institute for History.

Each year, the Institut français and French Embassy award the Bourses Descartes, which are designed to support students or PhD candidates who intend to study at a French educational institution or would like to finance a research partnership. In February, the Institut announced that part of a scholarship…

Patrick Dassen is a guest at the Institute for History.

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

This HJD Forum will look at how the architecture of diplomatic missions reflects both how countries see themselves and their role in the world and how they want other countries and their citizens to see them.