Spycraft, by professor Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman has been selected by History Today and The Economist as one of 2024’s best books

Josephus Justus Scaliger was one of the most famous scholars of his time and yet today his name is likely to be met with blank looks. His correspondence shows that this Leiden professor was also irritable to say the least. Kasper van Ommen will defend his PhD thesis on Scaliger’s legacy on 2 July. Find…

Professor Peter Bisschop has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. He will invest the 2.5 million euros in his research into puranas: ancient texts, commonly written in Sanskrit, that are up to fifteen hundred years old.

The Leiden bachelor’s programmes in Linguistics, Religious Studies and Ancient Near Eastern Studies have received the accolade of ‘top study programme’ in the Keuzegids (Study Guide) 2019 for Universities.

The 'language analysis interview' on the basis of which the Immigration and Naturalisation Department attempts to determine where an asylum-seeker without any documents comes from, does not meet the criteria of reliability and validity. Joachim Detailleur, student of Arabic, substantiates this statement…

Leiden historian Herman Obdeijn has created an exhibition for NIMAR about the centuries-old bond between the two countries. The exhibition opens on 1 March at the Université Mohammed V in Rabat. ‘The Moroccans changed from distant allies to close neighbours.’

This project incorporates spatiality into the discussion of medieval demography, allowing for a more nuanced view on medieval town populations. It establishes a maximum population count for towns for periods prior to 1400 and provides a means to compare the ranking of towns using size and density instead…

Ariadne Schmidt, Isabelle Devos and Julie de Groot provide you with refreshing insights concerning the study on urban singles in the period between 1200 and 1900.

Thursday 21 November 2024

The Children’s Rights Education Fund is an initiative that strengthens global leadership in children’s rights by offering financial support to students of the Advanced LL.M. in International Children’s Rights at Leiden Law School.

Cultural identity at the Late Prehistoric settlement of Aguas Buenas, Nicaragua, AD 500-1522

This dissertation sheds light on politics, education and linguistic identity by studying the case of the College of Jerusalem, founded by the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

Gold Matters: Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: A Multi-Actor and Trans-Regional Perspective.This project explores whether a transformative approach towards sustainability can arise in Artisanal and Smallscale Gold Mining (ASGM).

With regard to governance, policies and law, many Muslims and Muslim countries recognise the possibility that Islam has something important to say about the way society is to be ordered, governed, and regulated.

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

Jasper de Bruin, Guus Besuijen, Hans Siemons & Jeroen van Zoolingen (2012). De romeinse nederzetting bij het tegenwoordige Goedereede heeft waarschijnlijk een belangrijke functie gehad in de overslag en distributie van diverse goederen, waaronder keramiek en voedingsgewassen. De opgraving van deze nederzetting…

Water, Urbanism, and Sustainability in Roman Ostia

Százhalombatta-Földvar is a Bronze Age fortified tell settlement on the right bank of the river Danube, 30 km south of Budapest in Hungary. It is one of the best preserved temperate climate tells in Europe and well-known for the extraordinarily rich data it produces. Since 2014 Leiden students are welcomed…

In what ways do historical and current events affect how we should judge the legitimacy of political authorities?

Chinese organisations increasingly operate across the borders of China, and growing numbers of people from outside China are coming to live there. Professor Frank Pieke believes these movements have a significant effect on central and local government policy in China.

Case Studies in Etruscan Ritual Behaviour

In 2021, Leiden University will develop a new Sustainability Vision 2030. This vision for the future focuses on the primary tasks of the University: integration and visibility of sustainability in our education and research.

The aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of daily life, diet, mobility and health in late medieval Zeeland, as well as to test the potential of multi-isotopic analyses on a Dutch assemblage.

Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Cuisine and Western Foodways

This NWO-funded VICI project (2025-2030) led by Prof.dr. Petra M. Sijpesteijn examines the place-making processes in the early Islamic Empire.

Dating back more than 400 years, Leiden University has the oldest continuous chair of Arabic outside the Arabic-speaking world. Today the MENA region is studied at Leiden from before the coming of Islam up to today from a wide array of disciplines. And Arabic is studied within the diverse linguistic,…

Mapping sanitary infrastructure in large urban societies in the Low Countries, 1200–1900

Research within the centre is broad and pluralistic, ranging from the history of political thought to contemporary analytic and continental political philosophy and critical social theory. Members of the CPP also participate in the Research Profile Area on Political Legitimacy. The Centre is the proud…

Develop a tool to assess land tenure, access to land and, and land tenure conflict in Timor-Leste

Authentication Processes in Ethnographic Museums

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,…

Bronze Age settlement sites in the Dutch river area (c. 2000-800 BC)

Investigating the contribution of interpreters, informants, hunters and guides in the making of colonial scientific knowledge.

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of bago ts'amakkilo ('mouth of the Ts'amakko'), or simply Ts'amakko. It is a Cushitic language, spoken in Southwest Ethiopia and belongs to the Dullay cluster of Lowland East Cushitic. The number of speakers is about 10,000. The data…

How did early modern people find out about new knowledge? And did that make them more willing to accept innovation? In the coming years, we will study how and to what effect, new knowledge anchored among the wider public in the early modern Low Countries.

This project combines and reconsiders all the available evidence of the Scheurrak SO1, and use new archival databases and modern archaeological techniques to shed new light on the material culture of the Baltic grain trade and the Holland shipbuilding industry at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Leiden’s Institute for History has an exceptionally strong expertise in Medieval European History, with specialists whose interests cover virtually the whole continent.

Team History of Africa and the Americas

The main aim of this project is to provide a full analysis of the actual influence of French on Dutch in The Netherlands during the period of 1500 - 1900.

A monumental and extraordinary Early Iron Age Hallstatt C barrow from the ritual landscape of Oss-Zevenbergen

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Humanities with Université Mohamed VI Polytechnique.

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…

How can we broaden youth participation in STEM Learning

Tracing Transitional English in the Twelfth Century

Comparative and Dutch Politics is one of the three organisational clusters of the Institute of Political Science.

In the BA African Studies you will gain in-depth knowledge of Africa and the specific theme of your choice. At the same time, you will develop valuable academic and digital competences, as well as personal skills.

In the nationalist nineteenth century, people developed an interest in medieval language and literature. The study of medieval material in one’s own vernacular was thought to reveal a great national past. But why, then, was Old English studied by Germans, Danes, Italians and many other nationalities…

Thijs Porck has successfully applied for a subsidy for a research project that will study the early correspondence of G. J. P. J. Bolland, an autodidact student of Germanic languages who would later become one of the country’s leading philosophers. The project is sponsored by Leiden University Fund…