A mere day after setting foot ashore in the Bahamas on October 13th 1492, Christopher Columbus notes the broad foreheads of the inhabitants of the Americas. These permanently altered cranial shapes are deliberately created through the application of pressure to the head of the infant in the first years…

From 2012 onwards the primary scholarly and media focus in regard to foreign fighters has been on the large number of Westerners joining jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. Yet, much less attention has been paid to another conflict in the ring around Europe that attracted foreign fighters: the Russo-Ukrainian…

Jed Wentz realized a unique concept: 19-th century melodramas for voice and piano.

A study of early medieval reopened graves

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…

In December 2024, Dr. Jonathan Singerton (University of Amsterdam) was the featured guest speaker at the last lunch talk of the Fall 2025 semester. A full house assembled to hear Dr. Singerton take us on a journey across the Habsburg Empire and to spots far-flung from Vienna. Dr. Singerton told us a…

In this thesis, two potential therapeutic targets for diabetic nephropathy were dentified and investigated. First, we show that glomerular clusterin is upregulated in diabetic nephropathy and demonstrated that recombinant clusterin protein can protect the podocytes against oxidative stress in vitro.…

Providing a valuable overview of regionalism throughout the entire continent, Regionalism in Modern Europe combines both geographical and thematic approaches to examine the origins and development of regional movements and identities in Europe from 1890 to the present.

In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature…

A multiple isotope approach to human-animal dynamics in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide

According to a new study by an international team of researchers from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, the Caribbean was settled by several successive population dispersals that originated on the American mainland.

What can continuity and change in the manufacturing of locally made ceramics from the early colonials Spanish towns of Concepción de la Vega, Cotuí and Nueva Cádiz (1492-1600) tell us about the choices people made in ceramic production as a reaction the the changing social environment?

Bringing Dominican indigenous collections back to the community

It is integral to many cluster members’ research to use Medieval and Early Modern Arts as a lens for studying the medieval and early modern periods at large:

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…

This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

Unravelling networks of human mobility and exchange of goods and ideas from a pre-colonial, pan-Caribbean perspective

Supervisor: S.F. Portegies Zwart Co-Supervisor: A.G.A. Brown

OB associations are loose groups of young, massive stars. They constitute the last stage of the massive starformation process, and the context in which new stars are formed.

Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we address the limits and potential of montage.

A century ago, it was unclear whether the stars in the sky were clustered in groups, or widely spread in the universe.

The precolonial inhabitants of the Caribbean islands communicated, travelled, and exchanged objects and ideas along an expansive inter-island network. New methods of computer modeling shed light on these networks. Emma Slayton is set to discuss her work on this topic at her Defense on the 12th of Se…

In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this project inquires: Which early modern vices persisted into the 19th century and to what extent were those vices embodied in anecdotes, conveyed through commonplaces, or symbolically…

This project investigates how the first generation of Dutch printed books (the incunabula, 1473-1501) affected late medieval spirituality, religious practice and visual culture in the Low Countries.

The focus of this programme is the inter-community social relationships and transformations of island networks in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide.

ASLU 13

A core interest of our cluster members concerns processes of reception, transformation and (interlingual and intermedial) translation in medieval and early modern art, literature and media from diachronic and synchronic perspectives (in time, space, and between media).

Lack of manliness, avaricious or too imaginative. These are just a few of the accusations with which British scientists discredited each other over a hundred years ago. PhD candidate Léjon Saarloos researched British scientists around the year 1900 and their idea of what makes a good - and therefore…

On Thursday 27 June 2024 Sigrid van Roode successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

A full overview of THEOR PhD theses.

This study stresses the importance of investigating vitamin D deficiency in every community to better understand the deteriorating effect that sociocultural practices may have had on health.

The solar system was formed approximately 4.56 billion years ago. Despite the numerous theories that have been developed over the years, the formation and evolution of the solar system still remain unclear.

Reconfigurations of Practice, Community and Authority in Contemporary Aceh

Astronomical observations in Chile, research into native heritage or the treatment of eye diseases in Brazil - Leiden is researching a large number and a wide variety of different topics in Latin America and the Caribbean. Researchers and representatives from 20 countries met on 11 May in Leiden to…

Lecture, Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminar

Amerindian settlement patterns and early colonial cartography in Northern Hispaniola

Amerindian intra- and inter-insular relationships and social organization in the pre-colonial Windward Islands.

Organisation of settlement space and residence rules among the Taino, the indigenous people of the Caribbean encountered by Columbus

the production, use and exchange of bodily accoutrements through the lenses of the microscope

Publication of Johann Natterer's (1787-1843) word lists of Amazonian languages.

An Investigation into the role of copper-alloy craft production in the early medieval economy of northwest Europe.

Tracing the residues of Neolithic activities through the study of stone artefacts

Drones are proving to be a good means of mapping man-made changes in the landscape. Geophysicist Till Sonneman and his colleagues (archaeology) are experimenting with drones in inaccessible areas of the Caribbean.

The research involves the application and combination of archaeological and archaeometrical methodologies. Petrographic analysis and isotopic provenance studies of raw materials and exotics, and the study of the distribution patterns of these materials are used to gain insight into the exchange of goods…

What are the capabilities or limitations of traveling between islands and how does this reflect seasonal variation? Is it possible to show higher levels of connectivity between islands based on generated pathways between several sites on two separate islands?

Subproject of

The project focuses on an intriguing aspect of André Chénier’s poetry, which has not received much attention in scholarship: Chénier’s indebtedness – in the form of translation, adaptation, borrowing, reference – to Hellenistic poetry; it interprets the role of this indebtedness in his poetical and…

The P.J. Cosijn Research Fellowship is an initiative to give promising Research MA students of Leiden University with an interest in Anglo-Saxon Studies the opportunity to conduct research on Old English language and literature. The Cosijn Fellowships are part of the ERC-funded project ‘Early Medieval…