Cooperation with Latin America aims to build on the long-standing relation that Leiden University has with multiple partners in the region.

At LUCL, researchers aim to understand, describe, and preserve the linguistic diversity of the indigenous Americas.

In the master’s programme in Archaeology, you can follow courses on the archaeology of the Americas, deepening your understanding of this large region.

North, Middle and South America together constitute the single largest area in World Archaeology that is taught as a single focus. It is also the only major world area that saw societies develop from hunter-gatherers to early empires entirely independent from developments in Eurasia & Africa. It is,…

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the three priority areas of Leiden University, which was established by its Executive Board in 2014. The objective is to set up a comprehensive strategy.

The Centre for Indigenous America Studies (CIAS) at Leiden University is designed to coordinate and promote the teaching and research of Indigenous languages, literatures, cultures and cultural heritage.

The Centre for Indigenous America Studies (CIAS) at Leiden University is designed to coordinate and promote the teaching and research of Indigenous languages, literatures, cultures and cultural heritage.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

History of Africa and the Americas

Reasserting America in the 1970s brings together two areas of burgeoning scholarly interest.

Leiden students can go to LAC institutions with which Leiden University has signed student exchange agreements.

The Latin America and Caribbean Security and Intelligence Network (LACSIN) brings together scholars, practitioners, government agencies and the diplomatic community to develop novel and interdisciplinary approaches to addressing key areas of security and intelligence in Latin America and the Caribbe…

The article Sing with Me, Sing, Brother, of América by Sing with Me, Sing, Brother, of América Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela is published in Current Anthropology Volume 62.

This article investigates how parenthood serves as a critical turning point for young people in Latin America, influencing their criminal trajectories.

A MSCA Global Fellowship that aims to explore the socioeconomic and environmental implications of a Latin America circularity transition, and its impact on the EU and global economy.

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

This research aims to address the relationship between cinema and political thought in Latin America, in order to question a limited understanding of cinema politics, which has dominated the field of study since the middle of the last century, and to propose a different one that we will call politics…

Both Europe and Latin America face challenges globally and at home. Conflicts over land and resources have been resurgent in recent years.

Corporeality, intimately bound to the notion of space, to the diffuse border that connects, entangles, and fuses an inside and an outside, is understood in this book as a space which puts the individual at stake as a war machine that, in its fight for a form of life, redefines political territories.

When the 'New World' was really new, the Frankfurt publisher and engraver Theodore de Bry drew inspiration from some of history’s greatest explorers to record its wonders.

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present.

Analysing the EU’s interregional relations with three Latin American (sub) regions: Central America, Andean Community and Mercosur in order to create a set of conditions to explain the success/failure of EU-led interregionalism

How can archaeological datasets reveal the interplay between past indigenous understandings of the surrounding world and resilient and sustainable ways of life in the Isthmo-Colombian Area?

This study employs a comparative perspective to identify generic and specific qualities of petitions and petitioning. It charts the chronological development of petitioning practices over centuries. The interdisciplinary approaches provide range of conceptual and methodological expertise for reade…

Imagining the Americas in Print contains eleven essays, seven of which have been published before and four of which are new.

The archaeological heritage of South America is facing increasing threats due to the expansion of agricultural activities, infrastructure expansion, illegal wood harvesting, and the current fire emergency plaguing the Amazon and other biomes of the continent.

Researchers using remote sensing technologies have characterized pre-Columbian regularly-shaped earthworks in forests in Central America and the Amazon. In tropical forested mountains in South America, two challenges arise when identifying archaeological sites through remote sensing. Firstly, sites…

The aim of the project is to unravel the genetic and contact relations between the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and western Central America) and the Middle Andes region (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), as part of a larger endeavor to understand the historical process of the peopling of the Americas…

Chemistry, which is what Hans Klis studied in Leiden, is not what one might expect of a general journalist. ‘I’m a late bloomer,’ he says, despite having spent four years as America correspondent and written a book on notorious school shootings by the tender age of 34.

This project combines an extensive new open database on linguistic distributions, spatial modelling and areal linguistics in order to disentangle the roles of social and environmental factors on the emergence of linguistic diversity patterns of South America.

How did local lifeways and crafting practices persist and develop in the diverse environments of the increasingly interconnected Gulf of Fonseca (AD 400-1521)?

Best Job in America

Latin America matters! With its rich history, culture, its impressive resilience and creative innovation in the face of such a diverse array of challenges, Latin America can indeed show the way forward inspiring for positive change. Working together with Latin American institutions, our researchers…

In this thesis, I targeted the orchid genus Lepanthes, one of the six genera of angiosperms that surpasses 1,000 species in the Neotropics, as a study model to investigate the evolutionary processes that promoted species diversifications.

The book reinterprets the role of the UN during the Congo crisis from 1960 to 1964, presenting a multidimensional view of the organisation.

On 3 December 2019, Hanna Bosdriesz defended her thesis 'Furthering the fight against impunity in Latin America: the contributions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to domestic accountability processes'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. L.J. van den Herik and Prof. M.A.H. van…

On 15 May, the ambassadors of 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries were shown the highlights of research at Leiden University Faculty of Science. Furthermore, Prince Carlos de Bourbon de Parme awarded prizes to two young academics who conduct research in Latin America.

This question was discussed on the Dutch NPO Radio 1 broadcast with Barend Barentsen, Professor of Labour Law. On 4 September, Americans celebrate Labor Day, a day on which the hard-working American takes centre stage.

Across Latin America, stories of violence against women reveal how deeply gender, power en inequality are intertwined. Researcher Martín Hernán Di Marco tells how storytelling, activism and research together challenge the global cycle of violence against women and girls.

Astronomical observations in Chile, research into native heritage or the treatment of eye diseases in Brazil - Leiden is researching a large number and a wide variety of different topics in Latin America and the Caribbean. Researchers and representatives from 20 countries met on 11 May in Leiden to…

Migration is nothing new. A lot of people immigrated to the United States after it was ‘rediscovered’. The Netherlands also colonised a part of the New World and gave it the name New Netherland. Pepijn Doornenbal, a master’s student History, conducts research in the United States about how different…

This article studies the securitization of immigration in the United States of America (U.S.), through the analysis of the National Security Strategies (NSS) published between 2002 and 2017, using a two-layered analytical framework that combines securitization theory and agenda setting theory.

In this article, Bart Schuurman and Sarah Louise Carthy conduct further research into the understanding of the causes of terrorism by assessing differences and similarities between left-, right- and jihadist extremists and terrorists. The article draws on the Analysen zum Terrorismus, one of the most…

The significance of indigenous Amerindian knowledge has been marginalised in the history of the colonisation of the Americas. Wrongly, according to research by Leiden archaeologists. Indigenous knowledge and infrastructure were essential for the 'success' of the Spanish colonisers. Publication in the…

On Monday 4 September, Professor Christopher Martinez, from the Universidad de Concepción (University of Concepción), Chile, was invited by the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law to introduce his forthcoming book at our university.

The whole world gets raw materials from Latin America, but at the expense of nature. Håvar Solheim researches the role of organised crime in this environmental crime and Soledad Valdivia researches sustainable urban initiatives in Latin America. What do these university lecturers think the future of…

In the spring of 2024 the Faculty of Archaeology welcomed a new postdoc. Dr Adam Benfer, originally from the United States, occupies a double position as a researcher in the project of Alex Geurds and as the Faculty’s Data Steward. ‘It is pretty much what the title says: I steward data. Essentially,…