A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.

Alumni event, Arts and Culture

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

Crime is men’s business, isn’t it? Women are responsible for 10 percent of crime in Europe. Yet, if we look at the Dutch Republic in the early modern period, we find that in the towns of Holland women played a much larger role in crime.

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.

Americans more often donate funds to a presidential candidate if the campaign is backed by financiers from different, recognised social groups. This is the conclusion of Leiden researcher Vincent Traag in an article in Plos One published on 14 April.

During the CLAPEM (The Latin American Congress of Probability and Mathematical Statistics by its initials in Spanish), held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia in September 22-26, 2014, Julián Facundo Martínez received the Francisco Aranda Ordaz Award for his PhD Research in Probability, with the thesis:…

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.

How did learned natural historical inquiries into the underwater world develop in eighteenth-century Europe?

Fascinating images, articles of clothing and other unique objects from the past four centuries of the history of Leiden University can now be seen in the ‘Celebrating Curiosity’ exhibition in the hall of Rapenburg 70.

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.

Buying chocolates as a sign of love, getting the best deals on Black Friday and putting on a spooky costume for Halloween. In recent years, these holidays and traditions have taken off in the Netherlands, even though they originated on the other side of the ocean. Why are we so excited about American…

Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production

The Master's programme in History at Leiden University is set to change. From September 2026, three of the five specialisations will be replaced by new subjects that are more closely aligned with the field of research and students’ interests. One of these new specialisations will also be taught entirely…

The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 presents a new perspective on the uses of justice between 1600 and 1900 and confronts prevailing Eurocentric historiography in its examination of how people of this period made use of the law.

Political scientist Rebekah Tromble (Leiden University) and computational sociolinguist Dirk Hovy (University of Copenhagen) analyse how much hostility and sexism Clinton faces on Twitter, as well as who seems to be behind such attacks.

How do we explain the fact that certain areas had many large cities, while other areas were studded with large numbers of small towns and yet other areas had very few urban agglomerations of any kind?

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

More on the Dutch webpage.

In Luganda, the widest spoken minority language in East African country Uganda, the word for photographs is Ebifananyi. However, ebifananyi does not, contrary to the etymology of the word photographs, relate to light writings. Ebifananyi instead means things that look like something else. Ebifananyi…

The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

On the 6th of July, Anthony Jakob successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anthony on this achievement!

In this paper, Kantorowicz aims to track the persistent effect of former partitioning borders on property tax rates in Poland.

How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested?

Show People offers a comprehensive history of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

Bringing together the most current research on the relationship between crime and gender in the West between 1600 and 1914, this authoritative volume places female criminality within its everyday context.

They existed and were important, but for too long they have remained invisible in historiography: women. Ariadne Schmidt, the Magdalena Moons endowed professor, researches the history of urban culture in Leiden. Women take pride of place in her research. Inaugural lecture on 28 February.

Her part-time job as a city guide in Dordrecht opened Lotte Hamm's eyes: not business administration, but history was her dream study. This semester she starts her bachelor's degree.

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.

In which way was literary celebrity constructed in the nineteenth century and what forms of fandom were there?

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.

Lecture, Peace Histories Seminar Series

The aim of this research is to understand the linking of crises for the combination of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Masses of hamburgers, steaks, cheese and a lot of eggs: Americans love their animal products. But researcher Oliver Taherzadeh discovered that only a relatively small group of high-volume consumers need to modify their diet to achieve an enormous environmental gain.

Ben Van Rompuy, assistant professor of EU competition law, was an invited expert at the 23th Latin American and Caribbean Competition Forum (LACCF) organised in Quito, Ecuador on 28-29 September 2023.

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…

On 8 November 2021 YAL organized the successful symposium Interdisciplinary Research: Challenges and Opportunities.