Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Ariadne Schmidt will be appointed professor by special appointment of the Magdalena Moons chair at Leiden University. From 1 September 2018 she will carry out academic research and teach on the cultural history of the city, in particular of Leiden.

The transformation of the myriad of medieval kingdoms, principalities, local lordships, city-‘states’ and peasant ‘republics’ into ‘modern’ states, claiming some measure of sovereignty, remains one of the core themes of European history, because it gets down to the very root of the (idea on the) Europe…

Envoys jumping out of windows, fights, and illegal diplomacy: history student Tessa de Boer encountered them all while writing her master's thesis on Amsterdam as a diplomatic city during the 17th and 18th centuries. For her thesis, she was awarded the Uitgeverij Verloren/Johan de Witt thesis prize…

Through each individual decision, however small, people make history. This is what historian Katja Happe said in the Cleveringa Lecture on 26 November. She illustrated this with individual reactions to the persecution of Jews during the Second World War.

Jeff Fynn-Paul, lecturer at Leiden University’s Institute for History, was recently awarded the European History Quarterly’s 2016 Prize for his article “Occupation, Family, and Inheritance in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona: A Socio-Economic Profile of One of Europe’s Earliest Investing Publics.”

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

To what extent was labour-induced migration important to the functioning of the towns and cities of Roman Italy?

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500 provides a comprehensive survey of this complex and varied formative period of European history, covering themes as diverse as barbarian migrations, the impact of Christianisation, the formation of nations and states, the emergence of an expansionist commercial…

This book argues that Dutch Brazil (1624–54) is an integral part of Atlantic history and that it made an impact well beyond colonial and national narratives in the Netherlands and Brazil.

Moving Romans offers an analysis of Roman migration by applying general insights, models and theories from the field of migration history.

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

To what extent did the street patterns in urban districts influence crime patterns?

What are the origins of the Islamic Empire? And what was daily life like there? Two new Ted Ed animations answer these questions in simple language. Arabists Petra Sijpesteijn and Birte Kristiansen explain what the process of developing the videos was like.

This project focuses on urban commercial space in Roman Italy and deals with the impact of economic growth on urban communities in the late Republic and the Imperial period (200 BCE – 300 CE).

The multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying artistic, literary, political and religious ideologies.

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world, when, how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities?

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

My current research focuses on criminality and gender interactions in nineteenth-century Europe. This project uses a comparative methodology to explain gender constructions in a criminal and in a court setting.

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

Lecture, Ancient History Research Seminar

Fighting for the faith, caring for the sick, and praying for the soul of their benefactors were the main tasks of the military orders, who since the time of the crusades were well represented in the Netherlands in the Middle Ages, including the Frisian lands. Especially the Hospitallers and the Teutonic…

This research project focuses on the development of a popular national agency in late nineteenth century Amsterdam and the question how ‘ordinary’ citizens imagined ‘the Netherlands’ through the experience and use of their urban surroundings.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Prof. Giles Scott-Smith has made the first History MOOC (Massive Online Open-Access Course) produced by Leiden University. The MOOC 'The Rooseveltian Century', which covers the influence of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt through the 20th century, is now online at Coursera. The successful MOOC…

Painstaking research in Dutch and Portuguese archive materials, so far poorly assessed on the topic of social relations, reveals intense and intricate associations between different European individuals both in terms of ethnicity and social strata.

Alicia Schrikker doesn't usually get involved in urban history. As a senior lecturer, her research field is generally the colonial history of Asia and partly South Africa. So, the fact that she is going to carry out an urban history research project together with colleagues, is something that even she…

The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the…

The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Culture Versus the Rise of Modern Art (1860-1915)

The second authors' conference of the General Labour History of Africa (GLHA) project will be held from 10 to 12 December 2015 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

The central aim is to systematically study differences in crime patterns and social control between migrants and non-migrants in early modern Frankfurt am Main.