Of jars and gongs deals with the traditional ritual art of Ot Danum Dayak subsistence farmers from a stretch of tropical rainforest in the heart of Borneo. Together with the Ngaju, their neighbours to the south, they gloried in one of the most elaborate secondary mortuary rites in the world.

The Leiden University Institute for History has a wide-ranging academic scope unique for the Netherlands. This is directly reflected in the participation of her staff in various Master's and Bachelor's programmes at Leiden University.

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In Leiden University's video series on Leiden and The Hague as student cities, students interview each other at their favorite spots. In the fifth video of this series, archaeology student Julia spoke with Anthropology student Daria in Trianon, on Leiden's cinemas.

How can we promote more durable solutions to protracted refugee situations and which roles can connectivity and mobility of displaced people play to improve protection and resilience?

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes; World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting.

Due to the fact that the Frisian lands lacked major political centers in the Middle Ages and also because most of its monasteries suffered complete destruction in the second half of the 16th century, relatively few written documents concerning medieval Frisian history have survived. To analyze them…

This seminal volume covers the entire global history of urbanization since the rise of cities in Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC. Leiden historians Wim Blockmans, Leonard Blussé, Luuk de Ligt and Leo Lucassen contributed survey and thematic chapters.

Sonic Modernities situates Southeast Asian popular music in specific socio-historical settings, hoping that a focus on popular culture and history may shed light on how some people in a particular part of the world have been witnessing the emergence of all things modern.

University lecturer Tazuko van Berkel has obtained a Vidi grant of 800,000 euros. This will enable her to research the image of man that emerges from economic texts from ancient Greece.

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

What are the social, cultural, and/or educational consequences and challenges linked to the introduction of the international bachelor's programme in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology?

This book rovides an economic history of Portugal over the course of eight centuries, from 1143 through to 2010 and situates Portugal's economic growth within the context of European development. It also responds to fundamental questions about when, how and why the economy expanded, stagnated or co…

Are you thinking about studying Ancient History? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

A lively discussion on impact and society

A lively discussion on impact and society.

The master’s programme in Arts and Culture at Leiden University is uniquely positioned at the intersection of Art History and Museum Studies. Informed by leading interdisciplinary research, this degree provides you with a strong academic foundation for a variety of careers in museums, galleries and…

In one year, you’ll complete five months of coursework, conduct an Embedded Research Project, and write your thesis.

Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden Professor of Modern Japan Studies, was already the recipient of a VENI and a VIDI grant. Now she has also been granted a VICI, worth 1.5 million euro, for her research project Garbage Matters: A Comparative History of Waste in East Asia. ‘I want to do something that hasn’t…

Do you want to know more about Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology and what it is like to study in Leiden? Come to our online or on campus information events.

When people migrate, they leave an old environment behind and move to a new one. What exactly happens? How do the migrants feel? How does the host society respond to them?

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.

Leiden University was the first university to be established in the Netherlands. William of Orange gave Leiden Academia Lugduno Batava in 1575, it is said in recognition of the city’s courageous resistance against the seige by the Spanish invaders.

This ethnographic exploration of anticipation published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute draws on fieldwork among people with dementia and their families in the Netherlands.

As a critical commemoration of its centenary, this book presents a mosaic of one hundred carefully curated fragments by expert authors, shedding light on politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts in a hundred years of Turkey.

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Ethnography and Photography in a Moroccan Berber Village

This book by Damien van Puyvelde provides the first comprehensive English-language account of France's modern foreign intelligence and explores its evolution, operations, and role in global security.

From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular…

Natashe Lemos Dekker addresses the experiences of family members of people with dementia as they expressed their sense of gradually losing the person with dementia in the article 'Anticipatory Grief in Dementia: An Ethnographic Study of Loss and Connection' published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychi…

About the history of ProParte and its predecessors.

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 civilizations of ancient China and Mesoamerica, although not historically related and obviously different in many specific aspects (such as language and writing), show many interesting commonalities and similar tendencies in their cultural manifestations.

In this paper, Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga recast new light on the historical tattooing of the “Pintados,” or the the name by which the inhabitants of the Visayas Islands (in the central Philippines) were called by Spanish documenters in the sixteenth century. This is one of their…

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

How to related figures of savages to conceptions of history?

How do women and men living in logging concessions in Solomon Islands experience the impacts of logging during and after logging operations? This project assesses how and why industrial logging affects men and women differently. Using insights from an ethnographic case-study of the logging industry…

Through a comparative analysis of participation in outdoor recreation in Europe, this project seeks to investigate how social inequalities are embodied.

What are the humanities? As the cluster of disciplines historically grouped together as “humanities” has grown and diversified to include media studies and digital studies alongside philosophy, art history and musicology to name a few, the need to clearly define the field is pertinent.

For thousands of years, societies have fallen under the reign of a single leader, ruling as chief, king, or emperor. In this fascinating global history of medieval and early modern dynastic power, Jeroen Duindam charts the rise and fall of dynasties, the rituals of rulership, and the contested presence…

The Flentrop Organ is the third organ to have been built for the Great Auditorium in the Academy Building in Leiden.

The Leiden University Institute for History is responsible for the main part of the historical research carried out at Leiden University. The institute has a wide-ranging academic scope.

Are you thinking about studying History of Inequality and Power? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

This study links up the concept of place with memory, with the idea of transience and the transition from life to death.