This study aims to provide a long time perspective of human landscape manipulation. Studying the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems is of great importance to establish the character of past 'natural' landscapes and to enhance the management of current ones.

Which plants in the Mediterranean garden were already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and how were they utilized?

Visiting Researchers at the Leiden University Institute for History

This project investigates the rich linguistic history of the crucial language groups in East Africa and includes a search for words that indicate earlier lost languages. These outcomes, combined with recent archaeological and genetic research, will contribute to a new understanding of East Africa’s…

Speeches and speech acts have been crucial in settling the question at the centre of every political debate: who gets what, when and where?

Carsten Stahn has just published Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities and Access to Culture. The book is part of the OUP Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Series.

In A History of Plague in Java, 1911–1942, Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk demonstrates how the official response to the 1911 outbreak of plague in Malang led to one of the most invasive health interventions in Dutch colonial Indonesia.

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors.

It recently emerged that a Swiss firm secretly owned by the CIA and the West German intelligence service BND had been selling manipulated coding equipment to numerous governments, including allies, to spy on them through a Swiss cover firm for years.

This work analyzes ritual practices and knowledge related to the Mesoamerican calendar with the aim of contributing to the understanding of the use and conceptualization of this calendar system in the contemporary K’iche’ community of Momostenango, in the Highlands of Guatemala.

Promotor: P. T. de Zeeuw, Co-promotor: N. Neumayer; G. van de Ven

In educational settings such as museums, universities and schools, white, male, able-bodied and rational subjects still dominate. Although there has been a lot of theoretical work on processes of in- and exclusion through racialization, sexualization, and disabilization, we still know very little about…

Histories Connected: Seminar

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 14 May 2026 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm.

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

This special issue of Media History (22-3/4, 2016), co-edited with Helmer Helmers (University of Amsterdam), develops a new perspective on the early modern communication revolution. It discusses news as a specific kind of information – by its nature continuous, unreliable, and diffuse – which needed…

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism.

Why are professors still warning their students against dogmatism, prejudice, pedantry, and other centuries-old vices? What explains the persistence of these scholarly vices across the ages?

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Volume I of The Cambridge History of Strategy offers a history of the practice of strategy from the beginning of recorded history, to the late eighteenth century, from all parts of the world.

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.

Conference

An overview of the courses

From William Shakespeare to Marilynne Robinson, A Literary History of Reconciliation is the first study to examine representations of interpersonal reconciliation in work of literature across a long-term period, from the early seventeenth century to the present day, focusing on how these representations…

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science