Over the past year, historian Fenna IJtsma delved into 'four centuries of historical greenery'. As part of the Heritage Deal, with input from biologists at Naturalis and others, she looked for inspiration and examples from the past to contribute to a future climate-proof city centre.

What role did inequality play in the past? On Friday 5 December, Master's students in history presented their answers at a conference they organised themselves.

More than 40 years ago, a wrecked merchant ship was found in the Wadden Sea. PhD student Geke Burger looked at this archaeological find from a historical perspective.

The goal of this book is to place architectural studies, in which people’s interactions with each other and material resources are key, at the crossing of both landscape studies and material culture studies, where it belongs.

The research focuses on the understanding of symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain (one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico), by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands.

For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…

We are experts in the fields of languages, cultures, history, arts, societies and philosophy. Together we cover almost all continents and time periods. Knowledge of these disciplines contributes to a humane, safe and sustainable world.

The most famous monument of the Dutch Golden Age is undoubtedly the Amsterdam Town Hall by architect Jacob van Campen inaugurated in 1655.

Conference

How did dynastic organization – that it, the employment of non-ruling family members and the development of dynastic traditions and concepts – influence state formation in both Catholic Europe and Muslim West-Asia?

How can you figure out if a skeleton is male or female? How did they brew beer in the distant past? Visitors to ArcheoHotspot could examine archaeological finds and taste prehistoric drinks at the Faculty of Archaeology.

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…

The archaeological heritage of South America is facing increasing threats due to the expansion of agricultural activities, infrastructure expansion, illegal wood harvesting, and the current fire emergency plaguing the Amazon and other biomes of the continent.

Bandura Witharana defended his thesis on 27 September 2018

Located in the small Kingdom of Commagene at the upper Euphrates, the late Hellenistic monument of Nemrud Daǧ (c. 50 BC) has been undeservedly neglected by scholars

What is the role of local Caribbean individuals and communities in creating and perpetuating archaeological heritage? How has archaeological knowledge been integrated into education plans in different countries?

Attitudes towards cultural heritage have long been characterised by an ‘endangerment sensibility’ concerned with preventing losses. Recently, however, critical heritage scholars have argued that loss can be generative, facilitating the formation of new values and attachments. Their arguments have focused…

On the 22nd of February, Ami Okabe successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ami on this achievement!

This research project analyses the use of different, often competing, stereotypical images of Rome in Humanist Latin Poetry, by considering it as strategic appropriation of the classical heritage.

As of 1 September , Karel Berkhoff has been appointed professor by special appointment in Ukrainian History. In this position, made possible in part by the KNAW, he will focus primarily on dark moments in recent Ukrainian history: the persecutions that have taken place in the first half of the twentieth…

Master's students Eden Dijkstra and Rosemary Snelth are the first winners of the H.S. Versnel Prize for best master's or research master's thesis in the field of ancient religion. According to the jury, their theses were so original, well-written and of such high quality that both deserved first pla…

Corinne Hofman accepted her appointment as professor of Caribbean archaeology with special attention to those regions with which the Netherlands maintain historical ties.

Challenges for the protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources, traditional cultural expressions, and traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples in the international scenario.

Recently, Dr Gül Aktürk Hauser took up the position as Assistant Professor at the department of Heritage and Society. Originally an architect, she got caught up in the study of historical vernacular buildings in northeastern Turkey. Now her focus lies on the impact of climate change on cultural heri…

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…

Caribbean archaeological heritage is threatened by natural impacts but also increasingly by economic developments, often resulting from the tourist industry. The continuous construction of specific projects for tourists, accompanied by illegal practices such as looting and sand mining, have major impacts…

Conference

In the Spanish town of Guadalajara, there is a street named ‘Burgemeester Fluiterstraat’, named after a descendant of Leiden migrants who had done well in the South. He was not the only Guadalajara resident with Leiden roots: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a stream of Dutch textile workers…

What types of construction materials are used in the Global South, where are they, and what levels of societal services do they support? How will material use evolve under different development pathways and paradigms? What are these materials' environmental and societal impacts now and in the future,…

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

The Swahili coast has a long-standing history of transoceanic Islamic connections dating back to the 25th century. Yet, print, has changed the world – not only ours. This project unravels unique forms and archives of intellectual history emerging from within South-South connections. In East Africa Indian…

1) The in-use construction material stocks of the BRI projects and their temporal and spatial distribution. 2) Environmental impacts (e.g. carbon emission and biodiversity loss) of constructing BRI projects. 3) Socio-cultural impacts of the BRI projects.

Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums is a large-scale research project funded through the Dutch National Research Agenda, and led by Wayne Modest and Susan Legêne (Vrije Universiteit). Work Package 3 on “Value” phrases its main research question as follows:…

Rising geopolitical tensions are causing states and national elites to innovate their use of the past for present-day political ends. This is certainly true for the People’s Republic of China, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2024 amid mounting superpower rivalry, ideological tensions with the…

Promotor: Peter Stevenhagen

This project combines an extensive new open database on linguistic distributions, spatial modelling and areal linguistics in order to disentangle the roles of social and environmental factors on the emergence of linguistic diversity patterns of South America.

Faculty Lecture

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

PhD defence

PhD defence

Alumni event, Lezing

What do you build with when trees are scarce and winters are brutal? For hunter-gatherers living in current-day Ukraine some 18,000 years ago, the answer was simple: mammoth bones.

The Centre for Global Heritage and Development has been successful in applying for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the topic of threatened heritage at ICTO, the platform for innovation and education at Leiden University.

Subproject of