Wiebe Ruijtenberg (Law/VVI), Nadia Sonneveld (Law/VVI), Paul van Trigt (Institute for History) and Jasmijn Rana (CADS) have received a KIEM grant of € 10.000 for their project ‘Making up Migrants / Disabled: The pasts, presents, and futures of human classifying’. The grant will be utilised to organize…

Explore how cultural heritage can proactively respond to global crises, from geopolitical conflicts to climate change, through innovative cross-cultural collaboration between Latin American stakeholders and Una Europa.

Erik de Maaker wrote a monograph on how Garo, an indigenous community of the extended eastern Himalayas, experience and negotiate such disparities. The book shows how relatedness is reinterpreted as religious practices change, and communally held land ends up being privately controlled. Erik de Maaker…

Debate

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

Claire Vergerio, political scientist at Leiden University, has been awarded a VENI grant by Dutch research organisation NWO. This will allow her to conduct an in-depth analysis of the legal rights and duties of non-state actors involved in warfare. The aim is to tackle some persistent blindspots in…

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

Leiden University offers its students a wide range of bachelor's, master's and minors that explore sustainability or climate. Here, you find an overview of those programmes in the academic year 2020-2021.

One of the highlights of doing our master's programme is the opportunity to follow your own research project in which you combine the experience of doing a detailed and extended research project with the development of important skill-sets.

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding mono- and multidisciplinary teaching.

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.’

A fragment of a human skull discovered in sediments extracted from the bottom of the North Sea, 15 km off the coast off the Netherlands, has been identified as belonging to the extinct Neandertal group.

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?

On Tuesday November 25, 2025, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey traveled 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, Ms. Lotte Sophie Groenendijk, an alum of the History…

Language plays a central role in human life. We use it every day to communicate, learn and share ideas. But how do children acquire their first language? Why do languages differ from one another? And how do adults learn new ones? Linguistics is the scientific study of language and seeks to answer these…

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…

Renske Janssen started her PhD project at LUCAS and LUIH in October 2015. Her project is part of the research field ‘History and Culture of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity’, supervised by Jürgen Zangenberg.

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.

Monique Koemans werkt sinds 2,5 jaar op de Nederlandse ambassade in de Verenigde Staten. 'Leiden is een opvallende rode draad in mijn leven.'

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.

Commentators and scholars view both social media and cities as sites of fragmentation. Since both urban dwellers and social media users tend to form assortative social ties, so the reasoning goes, identity-based divisions are fortified and polarization is exacerbated in digital and urban spaces.

Both within the university and also with outside partners, Leiden University participates in sustainability programmes. These initiatives hopefully contribute to a growing and more robust sustainability movement, locally and world wide.

Jasmijn Rana demonstrates in the article 'Secular-religious self-improvement: Muslim women’s kickboxing in the Netherlands' that young Muslim women who kickbox develop agentive selves by challenging gender norms and living out their religious subjectivities.

In his historical analysis of upland societies of the Zomia massif, James Scott (2009) emphasizes how the modern state strives to control and “make taxable” all of its subjects. For Tania Murray Li (2014), the development of neoliberal markets is the primary driver of change, as she shows based on long-term…

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Sarah Giest and Annemarie Samuels, both Assistant Professors at Leiden University, researched the quality and coverage of the data being collected for policiymakers to be used, specifically pertaining to minority groups.

How does the social infrastructure affect administrative burdens associated with digital government services? The paper 'Administrative burden in digital public service delivery: The social infrastructure of library programs for e-inclusion' published in the Review of Policy Research by Sarah Giest…

Reworking Culture: Relatedness, Rites, and Resources in Garo Hills, North-East India provides intimate insights into the lives of hill farmers and the challenges they face in day-to-day life. Focusing on the ongoing reinterpretation of traditions, or customs, the book critiques the all too often taken-for-granted…

Andrew Littlejohn published the article 'Ruins for the future: Critical allegory and disaster governance in post-tsunami Japan' in American Ethnologist about the ruins left by Japan's 2011 tsunami.

The article 'Standardising care of the dying: An ethnographic analysis of the Liverpool Care Pathway in England and the Netherlands' by Erica Borgstrom and Natashe Lemos Dekker is published in Sociology of Health & Illness.

Une étude archéo-anthropologique de la céramique des sociétés caribéennes multiculturelles de la période précoloniale à nos jours

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

This is special issue of the journal Language & Communication. The papers of this issue delve into the multifaceted realm of (non)belonging.

This article discusses local expressions of crisis in Beed district, central Maharashtra. Both in public and academic discourse crisis has become the term of choice for the many structural deficiencies which make agriculture an increasingly precarious livelihood in India. While most voices subscribe…

In this book chapter, Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga unpack the indigenous category

In this article, published in Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia Online, Erik de Maaker posed three questions. How can the persistence of the community religion, albeit marginalized, be explained? What role is left for the practices, objects, and beliefs associated…

Museums and collections are often frontpage news nowadays. The collections stored and curated in museums, universities and private institutions are no longer seen as 'neutral' entities to be enjoyed without political connotations.

This procedure is relevant for contract and external PhD candidates only.

Intergenerational transmission refers to the complex and dynamic process with which values, ideas and behaviors are transmitted across generations. We are specifically interested in the intergenerational transmission of behaviors and beliefs that might result in harm to the individuals involved or society…

This book focuses on the element of thresholds – makeshift gates, makeshift structures and house doors – as concepts of liminality in ancient Near Eastern magical rituals, and the idea of transformation they reflect.

The ERC project 'Food citizens?' is a comparative analysis of a growing phenomenon in Europe: collective food procurement, namely networks of people who organize direct food production, distribution, and consumption.

The writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are famously and purposely marked by fragmentariness. Paradoxically, a central aim of his work was to connect: all his life he sought to further the integration of scholarship in the humanities which, he believed, had too long suffered from the prevalence…

LUCIR aims to bundle together, strengthen and disseminate existing research in the field of international relations.

A new publication on changes in the relationship between news and their public in Chile