Playing a musical instrument is generally considered to be a complex human behaviour involving the integration and coordination of a broad range of human functions such as perception, imagination, memory, information processing, emotion, communication, and dexterity.

Archiving Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeological Fieldwork Data from the Eastern Mediterranean (600-2000)

The Rutte IV cabinet is more or less complete. It includes more women than ever. For the first time ever, the Netherlands will have two ethnic minority ministers, and ministers without political experience but with plenty of professional expertise will also be making their debut. However, political…

Claire van den Helder (fourth-year Cultural Anthropology student) and Orestes Kyrgiakis (second-year Cultural Anthropology student) won the Pieter de la Court Medal 2021. The Pieter de la Court Medal is an initiative for students by students and is awarded annually to students who voluntarily contribute…

Promotor: Prof.dr. P. Stevenhagen & Prof.dr. K. Belabas (Univ. de Bordeaux)

The physical features of twelfth-century manuscripts from the Flemish abbey of Ter Duinen – such as script, page layout, and reading aids – show how their readers organized, interpreted, and transmitted knowledge.

Promotor: S.J. Edixhoven, Co-promotor: R.S. de Jong

How do urban residents in Brazil and the Netherlands (The Hague and Leiden) perceive the cultural benefits of urban forests? How are these benefits spatially distributed across cities? How do socio-demographic factors shape these perceptions, and do these differences vary between countries?

LiTechAe: Percussive stone tools related to stone masonry techniques seen through experimentation and use-wear analysis.

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?

Promotor: Prof.dr. R. Verpoorte, Co-Promotores: N.R. Mustafa, A.E. Schulte

This special issue of Contemporary Levant critically explores, at a micro and macro level, the structural role and religious, cultural and political interactions of the Greek-Orthodox, Melkite and Syriac communities in late Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine.

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

When and how to use the concept of “culture” . To medical anthropologists this is a core question, but also a challenging one.

The Cinematic Santri explores the rise and course over the last ten years of cinematic practices among a younger generation of NU associates (Nahdlatul Ulama), the largest traditionalist Muslim group in Indonesia and elsewhere.

This year’s EUSA biannual research conference, which took place in Miami in May 2017, saw a large delegation of the Europa Institute Leiden leaving its mark. In several panels, Prof. Luuk van Middelaar, Dr. Moritz Jesse (Associate Professor at the Europa Institute), Dr. Armin Cuyvers (Assistant Professor…

Insults have a stronger effect on people from honour cultures because their honour is at stake. Escalations can be prevented if their sense of honour is left intact or if the perpetrator expresses sincere regret Leiden psychologist Said Shafa has found.

There are currently two projects in Coptic Studies that are supported by the NVIC. Both are directed by Dr. Karel Innemee and both take place in the Wadi Natrun.

Synthetic hydrogels that mimic the natural extracellular matrix in the biophysical and biochemical cues it provides to cells are in high demand, however the cell phenotypes as they are observed in vivo in numerous cases have yet to be attained.

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

Although official law generally conceives of personal injury victims as individual rights holders, the actual experience of physical injury and its consequences is relational. Indeed, many researchers in the global North as well as the global South have contended that the very concept of the Self should…

On the 6th of January, Kefan Bao successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Kefan on this achievement!

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…

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much-needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of…

This book presents a thorough analysis of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s memory culture, focusing particularly on commemorations and representations of the Anfal and Halabja atrocities.

D.P. Kok defended his thesis on 10 October 2017

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

This dissertation provides an up to date description of the Indo European lexical stock of Armenian (ca. 500 entries) with systematic inclusion of unused data that are found in Armenian dialects.

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…

Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721) produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations – idealized images that conceal the violence of colonialism.

PhD defence

In this thesis, we investigate how deep generative models (AI models that can create new designs) can be better utilized for technical and industrial design. Our goal is to generate designs that are not only realistic (plausible), but also efficient, reliable, and usable in complex 2D and 3D applica…

This project will study the cultural meaning of the mythological figure of Orestes within the ancient Greek imagination, as it emerges from various literary sources from the archaic and classical periods.

In this article, the authors explore the concept of recurrent events, particularly focusing on the Eurovision Song Contest.

In the Netherlands, as elsewhere in the world, many patients who are in a palliative care trajectory prefer not to receive full or explicit medical information. This is more often the case for patients with ethnic or cultural minority backgrounds. As open-information provision is the norm, non-disclosure…