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.

Cigdem Oguz defended her thesis on 13 June 2018

Multi-objective optimization is an effective technique for finding optimal solutions that balance several conflicting objectives. It has been applied in many fields of our world, because practical problems usually have more than one desired goal. For example, developing a new vehicle component might…

In the late 19th and early 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese labor migrants crossed the seas to the Dutch East Indies. On the tobacco plantations of northeastern Sumatra and in the tin mines of Bangka and Belitung, they endured long hours and harsh conditions. Their journeys formed part…

Lecture, Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series

Silk Road Virtual Museum - A virtual museum of the art and culture of the regions that lay on the trade routes between Europe and Asia, popularly known as the ‘Silk Road’.

This book on Alba is edited by Maurits Ebben, Margriet Lacy-Bruijn and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier. Each of its fifteen chapters are dedicated to developing a new understanding of a sometimes misunderstood figure in European history.

The faculty of Humanities scores well in the anual QS World Universities Ranking By Subject list. This year we have placed sixth in the category Classics and Ancient History.

How have British cities changed in the years since the Second World War? And what drove this transformation? This innovative new history traces the development of the post-war British city, from the 1940s era of reconstruction, through the rise and fall of modernist urban renewal, up to the present-day…

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…

In White Lies and Black Markets, Fatah-Black offers a new account of the colonization of Suriname—one of the major European plantation colonies on the Guiana Coast—in the period between 1650-1800.

Combining approaches from intellectual history, philology and the study of Arabic manuscripts, this study places the Bornu scholar Muḥammad al-Wālī within his intellectual environment on the one hand, and it portrays him as someone who responded to the concerns of ordinary Muslims around him on the…

A Biography of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822–1914)

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

On 1 January Minna Valjakka was appointed Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory from a Global Perspective. Valjakka sees her appointment as 'extremely topical' because of the discussions about the decolonisation of the arts: 'Art teaches us not just about art, but also about contemporary…

Anneleen van der Meer discusses Russia's alleged use of chemical weapons in Ukraine in an article for The Conversation.

This programme aims to make the digitized archival sources of the Kerala and Tamil Nadu Archives more accessible to Indian and international scholars and to the widest possible audience, in particular to the people of Kerala.

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…

The thesis reconstructs Carl Schmitt's 1956 monography on 'Hamlet'. By scanning and unearthing books, essays, think-pieces, articles, personal diaries and private correspondence, this investigation fully addresses the unwritten philosophy of history -partially developed- in Schmitt's late thought. The…

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

This series of publications brings together new material on wellconsidered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies.

How did parties as political organizations emerge?

As part of the Leiden Erfgoed Deal, the Municipality of Leiden collaborates with Leiden University, Naturalis, and the Leiden Regional Heritage Office, to study the climate challenges facing the city centre and its historic green and blue networks. The goal is to contribute to a biodiverse, climate-resilient…

Since my master's thesis on the landed property of the Frisian monasteries in the Middle Ages I am highly interested in the do ut des-aspects of the relation between religious houses and the lay world. Key words here are: property, power, patronage and the role of religious institutions in the 'salvation…

Where did the new generation of antislavery activists get their inspiration to organize in large-scale pressure groups?

The central aims of this project are to establish the shapes of the various urban hierarchies existing in the provinces of the Roman Empire and (especially) to use the quantitative properties of these hierarchies to shed new light on levels of economic integration.

Gert Oostindie, Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History, has been made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau. He was awarded the royal honour by Leiden mayor Henri Lenferink after giving his valedictory lecture, ‘The future of the colonial past’, in the Academy Building of Leiden University…

The treasure houses of Leiden's University Library and Naturalis house wonderful historical collections with dried plants and botanical drawings. Professor by Special Appointment Tinde van Andel will be studying these collections. Inaugural lecture 6 January.

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration provides a complete exploration of the prominent themes, events, and theoretical underpinnings of the movements of human populations from prehistory to the present day.

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period.

This project sets out to map, document and analyze instances of squatting in Leiden from 1970 to 1990, in order to set up an online Digital Archive of Squatting in Leiden. This archive will function as an online resource for academic research, as well as a starting point for public activities such as…

The Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Maia Panjikidze will be paying a lightning visit to Leiden University on 26 March. She will give a lecture and take part in a debate on the theme of 'European perspective – The Georgian case'. All are welcome.

Ukraine has filed an innovative claim against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Ukraine asked the court to rule that it has not committed genocide and that a war initiated based on a false genocide claim was unlawful. Larissa van den Herik, Professor of Public International Law, discussed…

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Cosmopolis seeks to explore the transnational and cultural dimensions of intra-Eurasian encounters through Dutch sources.

Does the political context (e.g., democracy vs. authoritarianism) influence what makes people perceive authorities as legitimate?

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.

KIGS is a research project on communication patterns in the social sciences and humanities. Counting of publications and citations are common methods to measure international scientific impact. Based on citation analyses, various calculation methods and indicators have developed in recent years. However,…

Lecture

How has migration affected Irish and Italy society since 1945?

This project investigates the transposition of natural historical material, knowledge and vision, between different media (collection, scientific drawing, academic texts, the visual arts and/or literature) – a transmission that happens in the borderline between the traditional, emblematic worldview…

On 27 November 2019, David de Boer defended his PhD dissertation 'Religious Persecution and Transnational Compassion in the Dutch Vernacular Press 1655-1745'. For his research, he analysed several hundred pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals published primarily in the seventeenth-century Netherlands,…

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.

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'?

At the Dies Natalis Willem Otterspeer, Professor Emeritus of University History, presented the fourth and final volume of Groepsportret met Dame, his series on the history of Leiden University. De 'Strategie van de Aanpassing' covers the period 1876-1975. Otterspeer talked about his book in a podcast…

The Department of Art & Culture, History, and Antiquity of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is seeking to appoint an Assistant Professor (tenure track) in Medieval History. Deadline for applications: July 5.