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Het College van Bestuur laat door een postdoc een eenjarig vooronderzoek doen naar het koloniale en slavernijverleden van de Universiteit Leiden.

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.…

Unravelling networks of human mobility and exchange of goods and ideas from a pre-colonial, pan-Caribbean perspective

In 1808, the United States banned the transatlantic slave trade. Not everyone was happy about this, as Marcella Schute discovered. In her thesis, she shows how politicians from Louisiana made serious attempts to restart the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century.

Just as some people today dislike English influences on the Dutch language, in early modern times people also criticised the Frenchification of Dutch. But to what extent did French actually leave its mark in our language? PhD student Brenda Assendelft made a surprising discovery. PhD defence 24 May.

One of LUCIR’s key objectives is to bring together scholars and students of International Relations. To this end, LUCIR regularly organises events such as conferences, roundtables, lectures and book launches.

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…

The Historic Port Town of Sandy Point and its Anchorage

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Humanities with the Anton de Kom University in Paramaribo.

On the 16th of September, Bert van Pinxteren successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Bert on this achievement!

This book explores the return of six outstanding Kandyan artefacts to Sri Lanka by the Dutch government in 2023. It captures numerous reflections of the international interdisciplinary research team that investigated the provenance of these artifacts and the remarkable layered history that the research…

Eighty years after 1945, Europe again faces war in its own region. How to turn this tide and have sustainable peace in Europe? To discuss this question, this dialogue looked at the experience of war in Ukraine; Russia's role in Europe; lessons of Europe’s history for future peace; the values underpinning…

How are people of color represented in art collections? And do young people of color feel that museum collections reflect their norms and values? Developmental psychologist Carolien Rieffe is invited to serve on the Expert Group ‘Musea bekennen kleur’ because of her knowledge of children and young p…

A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: a number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. The original manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the Norman Conquest.

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Learning to cycle without a handbrake, saying sorry if you're late for a lecture and fathoming out the weird sounds of Dutch. Leiden's new international students get a crash course in Dutch culture during their introduction week.

The benefits department of the Dutch Tax Administration has attempted to reach backroom agreements with the judiciary about the decision period in benefits cases. Lecturer in tax law Martijn Nouwen says this harms the legal protection of victims.

Why doesn't the Surinamese resistance hero and independence fighter Anton de Kom have a memorial site in his former hometown, The Hague, while there are streets named after colonial leaders? The students of university lecturer Anne Marieke Van der Wal-Rémy are committed to the erection of a statue.

As part of the Leiden Heritage Deal, the Municipality of Leiden collaborates with Leiden University, Naturalis, and the Leiden Regional Heritage Office, to study the climate challenges facing the city centre and its historic green and blue networks. The goal is to contribute to a biodiverse, climate-resilient…

This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

PhD defence

In many Central and Eastern European countries, a period of greater openness emerged in the late 1980s. How did this affect the future perspective of residents? And can we learn anything from this period for our current times? University lecturer Dorine Schellens delves into the literature to investigate…

In 2023, it will be fifty years since Vietnam and the Netherlands established diplomatic relations. This will be commemorated in both countries. At the beginning of November, outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte visited Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. On that occasion Leiden University Libraries will launch…

The motto of the Institute for History is: ‘Global questions, local sources.’ Its researchers use local sources to find answers to major historical questions. Without historical analysis, it is impossible to understand and explain the issues in society today. Leiden itself has a rich history, with big…

The key subject of the Team Economic and Social History is Inequality (at local, national and global levels). We study this from an intersectional perspective: gender, class, ethnicity or race, religion, sexuality, age, ability/disability, citizenship and legal status. We study these categories of power…

The Surinamese-Dutch language, Parbo Beer and, of course, football. The ‘Dear Aunt Olga’ (‘Lieve tante Olga’) exhibition focuses on the shared Surinamese-Dutch culture. Full of cheer and with life experience to spare, ‘icon’ Aunt Olga (95) leads visitors through a shared history and does not shy away…

Ever heard of conversational artificial intelligence (AI)? Anyone who has ever interacted with Siri or Alexa is familiar with this technology. We use conversational AI every day these days and it is becoming increasingly important in service and sales. A consortium of Dutch scientists and companies…

A new elective course, 'History of Morocco and the Moroccans in The Netherlands

Dutch people are far more law-abiding than they might like to think. And they are very different from the Belgians in that regard. The different approaches of the two governments towards the coronavirus crisis, for example, can be explained from the history of both countries since the Middle Ages. Historians…

Ever heard of conversational artificial intelligence (AI)? Anyone who has ever interacted with Siri or Alexa is familiar with this technology. We use conversational AI every day these days and it is becoming increasingly important in service and sales. A consortium of Dutch scientists and companies…

As Scaliger professor, Erik Kwakkel is responsible for the academic context of the complete Special Collections of the Leiden University Library. His inaugural lecture on 15 May will focus mainly on the section closest to his heart: Medieval books.

Thanks to fanatical lobbying various groups of citizens and traders had a lot of influence on the initial success of the Dutch colony in Brazil. This is the conclusion of Leiden PhD candidate Joris van den Tol, who defended his thesis on 20 March.

What is the significance of the history of slavery for our present-day society? A special exhibition in the inner courtyard of the Academy Building features eleven insightful portraits of students and staff, and their answer to this question. The aim of the exhibition’s initiators is to make the subject…

Starting from September, the four Dutch mathematics clusters DIAMANT, NDNS, GQT and STAR will each be given 1 ME from NWO Exact Sciences, to be spent within a period of two years.

As part of Mariana Françozo’s BRASILAE project, a group of representatives of the Ka’apor people was invited to visit Leiden. The Ka’apor, an indigenous people from Brazil, are some of the present-day relatives of the Tupi-speaking peoples who used to live in the northeastern region of Brazil, claimed…

Our research focuses on a number of subthemes, such as the history of collecting, the agency of museum collections, the ethics of collecting (including legal aspects), and the integration of humanities and technical research in exploring the collections.

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world.

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.

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.

The academic staff of the Leiden University Institute for History.

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

On 11 June 2025, the MA in International Relations (MAIR) Programme convened its 2nd Humanities & IR Graduate Conference at The Hague Campus (Schouwburgstraat), welcoming over sixty participants from twenty institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia.