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…

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

Why are professors still warning their students against dogmatism, prejudice, pedantry, and other centuries-old vices? What explains the persistence of these scholarly vices across the ages?

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Conference

Every month a member of the Institute for History tells about a book that inspired him or her. Afterwards, the pen is passed on to another colleague. This month dr. Meike de Goede tells about the book 'Between Tides' by Valentin Mudimbe. The novel, little known beyond the circles of Africanists and…

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

Barbarism: from the 18th century to the present.

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

This dissertation explores how domestic political power struggles in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War engaged with the ongoing conflict in Cyprus and aims to demonstrate how socialist parties in Greece and Turkey struggled with the concept of the “nation” in battling for power and political positioning…

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.

The second major collection of papers from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project.

On the 11th of October, Micheal Swanton succesfully defended his PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Micheal on this great result.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

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?

The Master's programme in History at Leiden University is set to change. From September 2026, three of the five specialisations will be replaced by new subjects that are more closely aligned with the field of research and students’ interests. One of these new specialisations will also be taught entirely…

What is the iconography of propaganda specifically as it relates to the historical development of political ideologies in modern Egypt and how was/is this propaganda disseminated among creative fields such as cinema, art, monuments, architecture, and literature?

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

How are contemporary art practices from Southeast Asia negotiating notions of art and tradition?

Which genes are involved in woodiness and associated traits such as drought tolerance, flowering time, stem elongation, life span, and plant herbivory, and how do these gene regulatory pathways overlap?

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Liu Puning defended his thesis on 25 April 2018.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Together with students and local residents, historians Ariadne Schmidt and Alicia Schrikker researched the Leiden Transvaal neighbourhood. They will present their findings on Thursday 20 October, at a specially organised mini-festival in the neighbourhood.

In a podcast episode of 'New Books in History' Claire Weeda talks about her book 'Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion'.

The Institute for History announces vacancies for three PhD positions on Rethinking Disability: the Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective and one PhD position to conduct research on the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 presents a new perspective on the uses of justice between 1600 and 1900 and confronts prevailing Eurocentric historiography in its examination of how people of this period made use of the law.

From 1550 onwards, a great interest in the natural world developed across Europe. This interest was not only stimulated by a growing knowledge of local flora and fauna, but also by the import of numerous exotic animal and plant species. Think, for instance, of researches and collectors like Gessner…

Lecture, Seminar

French title: Communication et violences dans le Guéra et le Moyen-Chari (Tchad) de 1940 à 2010. This research investigates the relationship between the introduction of new means of communication and violence experienced by the local populations in the Moyen-Chari and the Guéra regions in Chad from…

In 'Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800', Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman, both of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and also affiliated with the History Institute of Leiden University, assemble an internationally acclaimed selection of authors,…

Debates on political legitimacy in Dutch parliament in the 1880s, 1930s, and 1960s

What did colonial officials and missionaries think they were doing?

Wenxin Wang defended her thesis on 26 October 2016

This research project focuses on the development of a popular national agency in late nineteenth century Amsterdam and the question how ‘ordinary’ citizens imagined ‘the Netherlands’ through the experience and use of their urban surroundings.

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

From colonial times through to the present day, large numbers of Javanese have left their homes to settle in other parts of Indonesia or much further afield. Frequently this dispersion was forced, often with traumatic results.

Ever since Nadine Akkerman, Professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture, came across a woman spy in her research, secret agents have kept cropping up in her work. Now there’s Spycraft, a popular history book exploring the espionage techniques used by early modern spies, which she has co-written with…

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.

This project is part of a broader research agenda aiming to better understand the relationships between the development of contemporary security concerns and the evolution of forms of security cooperation and crisis governance.

This project, South American population history revisited: multidisciplinary perspectives on the Upper Amazon (SAPPHIRE), investigates population dynamics in western South America on the basis of traces in the geographical, genetic, archaeological, ethnological, and linguistic record.