The Modern Migration Policy Act aims to ensure that the admission of regular migrants is effective and manageable.

Het is een wijdverbreid idee dat (post-)middeleeuwse steden een sterfteoverschot hadden en zij slechts in leven konden blijven door de toestroom van migranten; een fenomeen dat bekend staat als het ‘urban graveyard’-effect. Over details valt te twisten, maar duidelijk is dat de stad en de dood dichter…

On the 19th of April, Iris van de Voorde successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Iris on this achievement!

On 5 September 2017, Alessandro Tonutti defended his PhD dissertation

The Middle East has a rich literary tradition, which is steadily gaining a foothold in the West. Modern literary works deal with contemporary issues, such as the legacy of colonialism, the struggles between traditionalism and modernity, the place of women in society and the war in Israel/Palestine.

Professor Joke Bouwstra has been elected as member of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW, The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences). This is a very prestigious recognition and a great honor for Joke. You can find the announcement by the KNAW below (short version) and as an attachment.

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

Tim Koopmans is one of the great minds in the history of Dutch and European legal scholarship. He taught law as a professor in Leiden and other universities, among which Ghent, Cambridge, Utrecht. He practiced it as a judge in the European Court of Justice and Advocate-General in the Dutch Supreme Court,…

Neanderthals were able to make fire on a large scale with the aid of pyrite and hand-axes. This means they could decide when and where they wanted fire and were not dependent on natural fire, as was thought earlier. Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen has discovered the first material evidence for this. Publication…

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various English and Dutch cities in the early modern period.

In 2016, Marcel Cobussen successfully applied for two trainee positions at ACPA, funded by the Humanities Research Traineeship Programme at Leiden University. One of the results, a multi-media essay 'In Search of the Public. Exploring Contemporary Performance Practices of Classical Music in The Netherlands'…

From 16 to 26 July, the Leiden Institute of Physics organizes its annual summer school, titled ‘Modern Physics at all Scales’.

On Wednesday 25 June 2025 Dechun Zhang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Research conducted in this group aims at furthering our understanding of how communities and individuals deal with social change, conflict and trauma through remembrance and commemoration as well as forgetting in the arts.

Join-in courses zijn MA-cursussen over middeleeuwse onderwerpen gegeven binnen vastgestelde MA-programma's van de zes deelnemende universiteiten van de Onderzoekschool. Op aanvraag zijn deze vakken toegankelijk voor studenten van andere (Nederlandse) universiteiten. De cursusbelasting en het aantal…

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?

The role of transnational, non-institutional networks in the opening up of British transatlantic trade at the end of the 17th/beginning of the 18th century

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

On 10 June 2020, Gitta Veldt defended her thesis 'Europese productnormen en privaatrechtelijke normstelling'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. H.J. Snijders.

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various Dutch cities in the early modern period.

Archaeometric analysis of glazed pottery assemblages from the Early Byzantine to the Early Modern periods in the Aegean.

The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature

This project studies the development of civic engagement in the Netherlands from the mid-eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries, through a focus on the local and regional levels.

A scientific assessment of the site selection for the ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ Unesco World Heritage Site.

The first biennial symposium Environmental History in the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries is scheduled for October 25 and 26, 2024. This event aims to facilitate the exchange of recent research, ongoing projects, and key discussions within the realm of environmental history among scholars from…

Lecture and Masterclass with Alexandra Sapoznik (King's College London) Connecting economic and environmental histories in the pre-modern world 12 and 13 May 2025, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Deadline for submissions: 29 April 2025, 13:00

In early modern England, courts of law were working overtime. University lecturer Lotte Fikkers delved into the records of centuries-old court cases involving women. In Early Modern Women's Life-Writing and English Law, she reconstructs how the story they told in court differs from the one they wrote…

The Scientific Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) has commissioned the Institute of Immigration Law to evaluate the Modern Migration Policy Act. The purpose of this law was to develop a modern, selective and innovative admission policy for legal migration, which is welcoming for economically desirable…

On 25 and 26 October 2024, the first biennial symposium Environmental History in the Medieval and Early Modern Low Countries, is scheduled to take place at Leiden University.

Linguistic research on a unique collection of Dutch letters allowed us to gain access to the every-day language of people from various walks of life. Private letters by men, women and even children have been elaborately explored in the Letters as Loot researchprogramme, initiated and directed by prof.…

Jonathan Powell came to Leiden from England to conduct research into the role of women in early modern court cases. In addition to all kinds of exciting documents, he also discovered the biscuits from the Water & Bloem bakery and the wild flowers at the Groenesteeg cemetery.

We thank our sponsors!

Studies over tien eeuwen leescultuur

Several studies into the prevalence of child abuse in the Netherlands were conducted on behalf of the Ministries of Security and Justice and of Health, Welfare and Sport, the Samson Committee and the WODC.

De Nederlandse geschiedenis is nauw verbonden met die van de wereld als geheel. Door migratie, handel en kennisuitwisseling beïnvloedden mensen elkaar over grotere afstanden en intensiever dan we lang dachten. Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland toonde in meer dan honderd verhalen hoe internationaal de…