This book explores the intellectual history of the Dutch empire from the sixteenth century to the postcolonial era, going beyond systemic thinkers to understand how empire was perceived in day-to-day life. It takes a transnational and transimperial approach to the Dutch empire, connecting European,…

Engin Kiliç defended his thesis on 11 june 2015

How was time understood during the colonial period by Tlaxcaltecan Naua communities? What is the relationship between time, spirituality and ritual in the present-day Naua community of Santa Catarina? What does this tell us about the strengths and values of Indigenous heritage and about the impact of…

How did free agents oppose the monopolies held by the VOC and WIC in court?

How can a CLIL approach, with a focus on disciplinary literacies, improve the teaching of the LLA programme’s literary component in senior bilingual education (TTO)?

How did the Dutch Empire compare with other imperial enterprises? And how was it experienced by the indigenous peoples who became part of this colonial power?

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

The Global Abolitionisms Network, established in 2015, is an international network of scholars working on antislavery activism and abolitionism. It is affiliated to the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

Explore the intersection of arts, literature, and media in this interdisciplinary research master’s programme. Whether you're interested in medieval manuscripts or modern digital culture, this programme offers the flexibility to tailor your studies to your interests.

Are you thinking about studying English Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying Italian Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying German Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying French Literature and Culture? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Are you thinking about studying Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

How geographical and institutional openness in Dutch Guiana fostered a unique colonial economy. This publication is part of the Early American Places Series.

This MA explores contemporary literature and culture—art, film, pop music—through critical and theoretical lenses, including feminist theory, phenomenology, and ecocriticism. Key themes include diversity, interculturality, popular culture, and the intersection of culture, politics, and justice.

The available tools for academic literature search return a list of ranked documents, which might not be ideal for some tasks. To facilitate these tasks, I am creating a visual representation of the academic search space where the user can browse academic topics.

Late Antiquity is characterized by migration movements, political unrest and religious strife. The way we assess these religious conflicts is often coloured by a post-Reformation understanding of ‘religion’. In my research, I show that late ancient authors understood religion in a way that differs much…

How did interests outside the scope of the Dutch chartered trading companies influence the career-paths of Dutch colonial governors?

On 2 Juni 2021, Maarten Manse defended his thesis 'Promise, Pretence and Pragmatism: Governance and Taxation in Colonial Indonesia, 1870-1940'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. R. Arendsen.

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

In Dutch society’s discussions about remembering the colonial past, voice is often used as a metaphor for empowerment ('we must raise our voices'), whereas silence is often used as voice’s negative counterpart, signifying a loss or lack of power ('we will no longer be silenced'). Yet, silence is expressive:…

Historians recently started preliminary research on Leiden University’s role in colonialism and historical slavery. Our knowledge about this is too limited and fragmented. They are looking with fresh eyes at Leiden’s archives and collections. An interview with historians Alicia Schrikker and Ligia G…

Sex and power are closely linked, and this was certainly true in the former Dutch colonies. PhD student Sophie Rose investigated how sexual and love relationships influenced eighteenth-century power structures there. 'You can see that there was constant fighting over who stood where in the social hi…

ERC Starting Grant: The Van Manen Project. This five year project (2023-2028) is made possible with an ERC Starting Grant. It aims to (digitally) reunite all parts of the Van Manen Collection. This enables us to study it as a whole, helping us to understand the process of collection formation. More…

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to early modern European expansion?

Having mostly ignored the gains Dutch traders, investors and firms attained from serving the French, English and Iberian empires, debate in the Netherlands now demands a re-evaluation of Dutch colonial responsibilities. By recovering knowledge of these gains, this project will measure the wealth obtained…

The Lakenhal depot houses three nineteenth-century sample books in which the cotton company De Heyder & Co kept precise records of who placed which orders. History student Marit Scheepsma used them to find out more about the company's colonial contacts.

This project involves research into the oeuvre of the Sundanese sculptor Iko, who has worked for the Catholic mission in Java and has carved sculptures for a chapel and church in Ganjuran. The images were designed by the Catholic layman Jos Schmutzer and are characterized by a fusion in style and symbolism…

How can we best tell the current generations about some of the darkest parts of our past? To answer this question, researchers from Leiden are working with the Gedeeld Verleden, Gezamenlijke Toekomst foundation on public programmes about the Dutch history of slavery.

Questions of justice are not only the concern of legal professionals, politicians and activists, they also permeate culture at large. Literature, Cinema, Music and Artworks often revolve around questions about rights, justice and fairness, raising a wide range of issues, such as: how do we understand…

Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries presents a ground-breaking comparative approach to the study of multicultural literature.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

The skin has recently gained attention within body studies for its many specific cultural and social associations, in addition to its biology. This project aims to examine the different layers of meaning and the functions invested in the skin in ancient Greece: how did ancient Greek literary and medical…

Are you thinking about studying Literature and Society. Europe and Beyond? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project…

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

On Wednesday 21 May Adrian Perkasa successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The research project examines the site-specific event within the field of installation art and choreographic practices.

The representation of death children in Dutch literature through time

Together with students and local residents, historians Ariadne Schmidt and Alicia Schrikker researched the Leiden Transvaal neighbourhood. They will present their findings on Thursday 20 October, at a specially organised mini-festival in the neighbourhood.

Doctoral Thesis

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).

How do Nepalese exiles in England celebrate their festivals? What are North Korean monuments doing in Zimbabwe? The ‘Heritage on the Move’ exhibition shows what happens to cultures under the influence of migration. From 3 December to 7 January in Leiden University's Oude UB.

Beauty is a central concept in the Italian cultural imagination throughout its history and in virtually all its manifestations. It particularly permeates the domains that have governed the construction of Italian identity: literature and language.

Jan Erk, political scientist at Leiden University, has been selected as the 2016-2017 Smuts Memorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge. During his residency at the renowned British academy, he will work on his research project ‘The Enduring Impact of Africa’s extinct kingdoms and invisible chief…

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted…

References to nature and the environment in the Caribbean literary and the contemporary age of globalization.