The aim of this project is to foster a historiography that does justice both to the realization that scientific knowledge is constructed by local, contingent, and contextual processes, and the claims of science to objective validity.

Although fighting the culture of top-down education and stimulating lecturers’ confidence to adapt courses to local context priorities is no easy job to complete in three years, the “SLEEI inheritance” already has three main components.

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

In educational settings such as museums, universities and schools, white, male, able-bodied and rational subjects still dominate. Although there has been a lot of theoretical work on processes of in- and exclusion through racialization, sexualization, and disabilization, we still know very little about…

In October 2015, Director of the Master Course on Integrated Microfinance Management (M.IMM) of the Faculty of Economics & Business of Universitas Padjadjaran in Bandung, Indonesia came to visit the LEAD Programme in Leiden

From student exchanges and a joint laboratory to heritage research and a knowledge consortium, the Indonesian Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) is in various respects an important partner for Leiden University.

On 6 September 2018 Jacqueline Vel of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society organised a master class on ‘Access to Justice’ at the invitation of the Wira Wacana Christian University in Waingapu, Sumba, Indonesia.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' analyzes Greek economic thinking of the Hellenistic period.

In Poland the commemoration of acts of resistance is being misused to distort the history of the Holocaust. That is what Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski said in his inaugural lecture on 26 November. In her lecture, the second Cleveringa Professor, Barbara Engelking, pointed to the often indifferent…

At the beginning of the Academic Year in September 2015, the Dean of the Faculty of Science of Universitas Padjadjaran in Bandung, Indonesia, Mrs. Prof.Dr. Budi Nurani visited the LEAD Programme in Leiden.

Large numbers of Indonesians were active members of the resistance during the Second World War. One of them was Irawan Soejono, a student at Leiden University. He was shot dead on Boommarkt, during a raid on 13 January 1945. Seventy-five years later he was remembered in a small ceremony in the very…

On 1 July – Keti Koti, in the year ahead, our university community will be able to reflect extensively on the history of slavery by engaging in research, education and many other activities.

So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

The coming two years the Van Vollenhoven Institute (VVI, Leiden University) and ICEL (the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law) will collaborate to improve environmental regulation in Indonesia.

Three Dutch universities: Leiden, Groningen and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have joined forces this year to organize a first ever Pre-doctoral programme in Indonesia for future and potential Indonesian PhD candidates at Dutch universities.

As from 1 February Adriaan Bedner is the new KITLV professor (bij special appointment) of Law and Society in Indonesia at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (VVI), Leiden University.

Managing Diversity: Supervising Functions in Managing Colonial Workplaces

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…

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism.

How can we assist Universitas Indonesia's department of International law to improve their educational and applied research programs on Transnational Law, Asset Recovery and International Investment Arbitration, with an eye on Indonesia’s security and rule of law reform agenda and the needs of the…

Who is Economic Man? Every economic paradigm presupposes an anthropology, a theory of human nature. This project explores the anthropologies presupposed and produced by ancient Greek economic texts, and the specific knowledge forms that shape these anthropologies.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

This research delves into the unique cultural approach of the Tenggerese people, an Indigenous community in East Java, Indonesia, regarding elderly care. It focuses on their traditional practices of bakti (‘filial piety’) and sayan (‘mutual aid’), deeply ingrained in the community's lifestyle and va…

Assistant professor Fenneke Sysling spoke in National Geographic about the return of the ‘Java Man’ to Indonesia.

It is crucial that Leiden University reflects on its colonial history. These were the words of Cleveringa Professor Gert Oostindie in his inaugural lecture on 24 November. ‘As a university community, we must dare to hold up a mirror to ourselves and, where possible and necessary, also take concrete…

University Lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe discusses on The Conversation how Trump's Greenland proposal overlooks the historical discrimination faced by Indigenous Alaskans.

Volume 4 and 5 of the Leiden series 'Dutch Sources on South Asia' are now available, written by Markus Vink (vol.4) and Carolien Stolte (vol.5).

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

The seminar is organised by the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (VVI), The Royal Netherlands Institute for the Study of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean (KITLV) and Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS).

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.

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many staff of Leiden institutes abroad to leave their posts in a hurry. How is the KITLV Jakarta team doing now? Director Marrik Bellen talks about the turbulent times for this Leiden institute and its staff. And can we learn anything from the Indonesian approach?

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

Regulating Relations: Controlling Sex and Marriage

A team of researchers has dated a prehistoric painting in Indonesia to at least 51.200 years ago, they have proposed in a study that this painting is the oldest known example of “figurative” art.

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

Leiden University works close with Indonesian and Dutch scholarship providers in order to expand the opportunities for Indonesian students to study in Leiden.

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

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