Nearly all documents from the 16th and 17th centuries were written by more than one person but attributed to only one author. Professor Nadine Akkerman wants to rectify this oversight in her research on scribes.

The archive of a 17th-century postmaster has been discovered in the Museum for Communication in The Hague. Using new scanning techniques, the international research team Signed, Sealed & Undelivered, headed by literary scholar Nadine Akkerman from Leiden University and historian David van der Linden…

See below for the full programme and abstracts of all papers.

The Leiden Leadership Centre is an interdisciplinary network organisation branching out from its place within the Institute of Public Administration, Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (Leiden University in The Hague). The LLC functions as a platform by connecting students, practitioners, and…

Obsidian, a volcanic glass-like material, is often used for making tools by Mesoamerican societies. In Honduras, certain obsidian artefacts do not yet have a known provenance. PhD candidate Marie Kolbenstetter and Assistant Professor Dennis Braekmans were awarded a Corrie Bakels Grant to explore thus…

Piercing through the skull with an ice pick, administering electric shocks without an anaesthetic, or applying leeches to the uterus: these may seem like medieval methods of torture, but they are in fact therapies used in medicine. Willem van der Does writes about all of them in his new book. ‘Physicians…

On 8 and 9 May 2018 the Workshop 'Challenging the Liberal World Order: The History of the Global South, Decolonization and the United Nations, 1955-2000' takes place at Leiden University.

The Department of History of Art in Oxford has appointed Leiden University professor Caroline van Eck as Slade Professor of Fine Art for the second semester of academic year 2016-2017. As Slade Professor Van Eck will spend a semester in office at Oxford University and deliver eight public lectures and…

Jessica den Oudsten won this year’s Uitgeverij Verloren/Johan de Witt thesis award for history with her master’s thesis, entitled

The hinterland of important centres like Petra (Southern Jordan) can provide essential information that contribute to the understanding of their rise, expansion and decline.

The stadtholder’s court in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands has long been underestimated. Real courts and the associated court culture were to be found elsewhere in Europe. PhD candidate Quinten Somsen is trying to reverse this image. ‘The stadtholder’s court was actually very lively.’

Louis Sicking's Maritime Conflict Management in Atlantic Europe was awarded an 'Internationalisation in the Humanities' grant from NWO. What can we learn from how maritime conflicts were managed in the past?

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…

The NWO has awarded four Leiden researchers with an Internationalisation in the Humanities grant.

Workshop

Seven large reproductions of works by Rembrandt on seven Leiden University buildings reveal the relationship between the painter and the University. Rembrandt van Rijn enrolled in the University in 1620 and painted the portraits of various alumni of the University. In addition, the University Library…

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

GLOBOX is a spatially differentiated multimedia fate, exposure and effect model. It is used for the calculation of spatially differentiated LCA characterisation factors on a global scale.

Teaching is a vital part of CompaRe’s activities. Both in Leiden and abroad, our aim is to educate the minds that will redesign and drive forward the regional integration of tomorrow. We do so by offering multiple courses on comparative regional integration in Leiden, the creation of a MOOC on comparative…

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

On Tuesday November 25, 2025, Sarah Cramsey travelled with students from her masters seminar on 'New Approached to the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe' taught at the History Institute to Amsterdam for a unique opportunity. There, Lotte Sophie Groenendijk, an alumna of the History Research Masters…

On the occasion of the retirement of Robert Ross, Professor in African History at Leiden University, his successor and former student Jan-Bart Gewald wrote a valedictory note.

Is it possible to formulate a new conceptual foundation for attributing an evaluative role to historiography of science, without relinquishing the historiographic sensitivity of recent work in the discipline?

In what ways and to what ends did Parisian buildings overwhelm the early modern public? This study is concerned with the experience of the sublime in architecture in seventeenth-century Paris.

Political games have existed throughout history, but what is the role of 'play' in the way the American political world has developed? University lecturer Sara Polak has received an ERC Starting Grant to investigate this.

This book offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of multilingualism among the Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish languages on the coffee frontier of Southern Peru, set against the backdrop of economic transformation and deforestation in the world’s last great forest.

How did the Dutch Empire compare with other imperial enterprises? And how was it experienced by the indigenous peoples who became part of this colonial power?

As a practice in which human beings were held captive for an indefinite period of time, coerced into extremely dependent and exploitative power relationships, denied rights (including rights over their labor, lives, and bodies), often vulnerable to forced relocation by various means, and forced to labor…

The Historic Port Town of Sandy Point and its Anchorage

Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is one of the broadest of its kind, offering courses in no fewer than 80 different languages and a very broad spectrum of academic disciplines.

What is it like to study Urban Studies in The Hague? Sonia Dobkowska, second year student, describes what a typical day looks like for her.

Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies 23, 2007

The Caribbean before Columbus is a new synthesis of the region’s insular history. It combines the results of the authors’ 55 years of archaeological research on almost every island in the three archipelagoes with that of their numerous colleagues and collaborators.

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

This unique collection applies globalization concepts to the discipline of archaeology, using a wide range of global case studies from a group of international specialists.

Through a lens that examines the intersection of ageing, gender, class, and migration, this project addresses the “care deficit” in European countries and the employment of migrant women from Latin America to fill this deficit.

ASLU 27 Sjoerd van der Linde (2012)

The research aims to understand how did Cuban and Dominican landscape encapsulate historical conceptual transformations about human –nature spiritual interaction after the Spanish conquest? More specifically, what are the present day cultural associations with Cuban and Dominican natural landscape?…

Examining mediation and moderation.

From 20 June to 12 August 2011 a team from the Caribbean Research Group, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University and the St. Eustatius Centre for Archaeological Research (SECAR) under the direction of Dr. Grant Gilmore III, Dr. Menno Hoogland, Prof. Corinne Hofman and Dr. Alice Samson carried out…

On young Muslims seeking to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.