This book examines the critical role of information and knowledge in early modern Europe's global pursuits, exploring challenges in trusting distant information, the development of doubt in intercultural encounters, and the impact of misinformation.

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

Ariadne Schmidt, Isabelle Devos and Julie de Groot provide you with refreshing insights concerning the study on urban singles in the period between 1200 and 1900.

This research proposal focuses on historically informed performance (HIP) and adaptive performance practices within the late 18th-century German musical context.

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.

In Luganda, the widest spoken minority language in East African country Uganda, the word for photographs is Ebifananyi. However, ebifananyi does not, contrary to the etymology of the word photographs, relate to light writings. Ebifananyi instead means things that look like something else. Ebifananyi…

The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

On the 6th of July, Anthony Jakob successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anthony on this achievement!

In this paper, Kantorowicz aims to track the persistent effect of former partitioning borders on property tax rates in Poland.

On the 27th of June, Timothy Mac Hadjah successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Timothy on this achievement!

Show People offers a comprehensive history of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

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.

Engin Kiliç defended his thesis on 11 june 2015

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

On 1 November, Stijn Bussels assumed his role as professor of Art History, especially before 1800 at Leiden University. The chair is located at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

Hifadhi ya Dijiti ya Ustadh Mau

This book argues that Dutch Brazil (1624–54) is an integral part of Atlantic history and that it made an impact well beyond colonial and national narratives in the Netherlands and Brazil.

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

The central aim is examining gender differences in recorded crime, particularly in relation to interpersonal violence, in early modern Bologna.

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…

The transformation of the myriad of medieval kingdoms, principalities, local lordships, city-‘states’ and peasant ‘republics’ into ‘modern’ states, claiming some measure of sovereignty, remains one of the core themes of European history, because it gets down to the very root of the (idea on the) Europe…

At the end of the fifteenth century, two intriguing Christian epics were written in Virgilian Latin by the poets Sannazaro and Vida. They did so in accordance with the wishes of the pope. These epics, both praised and criticized by contemporaries, are often seen as innovative for their specific combination…

To maximise your personal development, we ensure tutorials are small-scale and staff members extremely accessible. In year one, you’ll have an average of 12 contact hours, half of which comprise lectures (in English) and the remainder tutorials (optionally Dutch or English).

Envoys jumping out of windows, fights, and illegal diplomacy: history student Tessa de Boer encountered them all while writing her master's thesis on Amsterdam as a diplomatic city during the 17th and 18th centuries. For her thesis, she was awarded the Uitgeverij Verloren/Johan de Witt thesis prize…

Through each individual decision, however small, people make history. This is what historian Katja Happe said in the Cleveringa Lecture on 26 November. She illustrated this with individual reactions to the persecution of Jews during the Second World War.

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.

How can the importance of the image in late medieval spirituality be understood in the context of the love mysticism inspired by the imagery of the Song of Songs?

Jeff Fynn-Paul, lecturer at Leiden University’s Institute for History, was recently awarded the European History Quarterly’s 2016 Prize for his article “Occupation, Family, and Inheritance in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona: A Socio-Economic Profile of One of Europe’s Earliest Investing Publics.”

From the First World War until the height of the Cold War, actors from the decolonizing world sought to build connections with international peace movements. These efforts produced new networks and practices of solidarity while also exposing tensions over the centrality of decolonization in global struggles…

Drawing on a broad array of sources, this project examines modern retrievals of Bacon’s idols, thereby testing Justus von Liebig’s intriguing observation, back in 1863, that Bacon’s name lived on mainly in mottos or stereotypical phrases. More importantly, it examines the rhetorical purposes served…

This project analyzes to what extent hodegetical textbooks relied on each other in warning their readers against vicious habits, how much continuity their catalogs of vice displayed, and to what extent vices that persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were associated with easy-to-remember…

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

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

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.

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500 provides a comprehensive survey of this complex and varied formative period of European history, covering themes as diverse as barbarian migrations, the impact of Christianisation, the formation of nations and states, the emergence of an expansionist commercial…

Why did 'character', 'habit', and 'virtue' serve as key terms in late 19th and early 20th-century scholarly correspondences, biographies, and obituaries? Why did scholars around 1900 display so much interest in the working habits and character traits of what they called the 'scholarly self'?

In the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) housed its enslaved people on ‘Slave Island’ in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Today ‘Slave Island’ is under serious threat from property developers. Senior lecturer Alicia Schrikker, together with her Sri Lankan colleagues Iromi Perera…

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…