The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

Inspired by a critical reconsideration of current monolithic approaches to the study of Greek religion, this book argues that ancient Greeks displayed a disquieting capacity to validate two (or more) dissonant, if not contradictory, representations of the divine world in a complementary rather than…

Our Institute’s research focuses on ‘global vulnerabilities and social resilience’. Specifically, we highlight three interconnected themes: diversity, sustainability, and digitalisation.

Bart Barendregt receives a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros from the NWO for his research project 'One between the Zeros, an Anthropology of Artificial Intelligence in Islam'.

The aim of the project is to contribute to the process of archive formation ongoing in Post-Apartheid South Africa through the inclusion of photographs that have been either unacknowledged or excised from the national canon.

Colleagues from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences work on a variety of topics that contribute to a healthy society. Erik Bähre, Tessa Minter and Natashe Lemos Dekker presented their work during the Healthy Society Event on 9 June 2022.

World History — a Genealogy charts the history of the discipline through twenty-five in-depth conversations with historians whose work has shaped the field of world history in fundamental ways.

With Muslim Futures, our ambition is to create spaces where imagination leads. In an increasingly destabilizing global context, where climate, economic, and social crises expose the limits of current systems, people across disciplines are beginning to ask: 'What kind of society do we want to live in?'…

This book provides an exploration into the historical transformations of women's interactions with state police in the Western world from 1800 to 1950.

Why does the history of dogmatism deserve our attention? This open access book analyses uses of the term, following dogmatism from Victorian Britain to Cold War America, examining why it came to be regarded as a vice, and how understandings of its meaning have evolved.

Islamic Thought and History (ITH) is a peer-reviewed book series that publishes new approaches to Islamic thought and the history of ideas in the Islamic civilisation.

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

The researchers and students at the Department of Archaeological Heritage and Society at the Faculty of Archaeology study the role of the past in modern societies. They want to find out more about the relationships between the past and the present, and the role that heritage plays.

Many lecturers aim to make their courses more diverse, but they often encounter problems in the process. How can they receive the information they need? This project ‘Wanted: roadmap’ develops a roadmap for Dutch (academic) historians to bring diversity into practice. BA1 teaching in Graeco-Roman history…

In a podcast episode of 'The Dissenter' Eric Storm talks about his book 'Nationalism: A World History'.

Migration is an important topic of academic, public and political debate. Migration research generates a wealth of articles. The Journal of Migration History (JMH) is the first to specialize in the field. Articles on migration history either appear in journals that specialize on current issues, or in…

LUCIS works with Science ON AIR to put its researchers in the spotlight. For that purpose, several online videos of LUCIS members have been produced.

Climate change, depletion of natural resources, loss of natural and cultural landscapes, and many other (ecological) sustainability challenges urge us to (re)evaluate human interaction with the natural world. This renewed environmental consciousness has invigorated not only scientists working on effects…

This book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. It contains seven articles on the global panoramic visual history from the early modern to modern times and Istanbul's place within this history.

This book published by Oxford University Press discusses religion and trade in world history.

More than 100 anthropologists work at Leiden University – not only at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CA/DS) in the Faculty of Social Sciences, but also within other faculties, for example at Archaeology, Law, the Humanities, or the Leiden University Medical Centre…

In a modernist interpretation of migration controls, nation states play a major role. This book challenges this interpretation by showing that comprehensive migration checks and permanent border controls appeared much earlier, in early modern dynastic states and empires, and predated nation states by…

Ironies of Solidarity is an ethnographic study of how financial products and services affect inequalities and conflicts in South Africa.

Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering.

Disciplinary History and Epistemology

Spirit priests and ancestor cults in new guinea's far west

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published Annemarie Samuels' article on the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It's a detailed ethnographic account of the experiences of three Indonesian survivors.

This volume examines how the history of the humanities might be written through the prism of scholarly personae, understood as time- and place-specific models of being a scholar.

What does it mean to live in an era of ‘posts’? At a time when ‘post-truth’ is on everyone’s lips, this volume seeks to uncover the logic of post-constructions – postmodernism, post-secularism, postfeminism, post-colonialism, post-capitalism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-tradition, post-Christian,…

If you've ever wondered why people behave the way they do or how societies work, studying cultural anthropology and development sociology could be for you. Although these two disciplines once followed separate paths, they are now closely intertwined. This article explores what each involves, where they…

Although graduate schools and PhD programs at various Dutch universities do provide methodological training in the social sciences, PhD students in anthropology frequently express a need for more specialized anthropology courses that provide in-depth discussions of cutting-edge theory and state-of-the-art…

Rachel Schats has been a familiar face at the Faculty of Archaeology since she started her bachelor’s in Archaeology in 2005. Now she is an assistant professor, working on her Veni project on malaria in the Middle Ages. ‘I have included in this project so many skeletal collections that no one has ever…

This study aims to provide a long time perspective of human landscape manipulation. Studying the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems is of great importance to establish the character of past 'natural' landscapes and to enhance the management of current ones.

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).