Dutch Studies is a unique bachelor’s programme in which you will quickly acquire fluency in spoken and written Dutch at a high academic level, while also gaining a deep understanding of the culture and history of the Netherlands.

The compulsory reading list is infamous among secondary school students, and for all the wrong reasons. This prompted the Faculty of Humanities and the Onderwijsnetwerk Zuid-Holland (South Holland Education Network) to launch the Alternative Reading List Award, in search of books that motivate young…

Neanderthals and modern humans in Belgium, a bone story

Barbarism: from the 18th century to the present.

The aim of the project is to contribute to the process of archive formation ongoing in Post-Apartheid South Africa through the inclusion of photographs that have been either unacknowledged or excised from the national canon.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

This study discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan societies and how that position was informed by Buddhist monastic ideology.

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research…

Imaging and Imagining Palestine is the first comprehensive study of photography during the British Mandate period (1918–1948).

Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721) produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations – idealized images that conceal the violence of colonialism.

Leiden University is home to over a hundred specialists studying the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. From 2017-2018 onwards, they will join forces to offer two new options for specialisation within existing MA programmes: Medieval Studies and Early Modern Studies.

This study offers a new view on public services in the early modern Low Countries and answers the following questions: who provided public facilities in urban communities and in which ways did public amenities change in the period between 1500 and 1800?

Vrouwen moeten in het nieuwe pensioenstelsel nog beter oppassen voor een te laag pensioen. In een interview met Nationale Nederlanden geeft Suzanne Kali, docent/onderzoeker pensioenrecht, afdeling Sociaal Recht, uitleg over deze pensioenkloof.

Chinees-Nederlandse kinderen krijgen via hun moeders en kinderboeken mee dat witte mensen de norm zijn, zo ontdekte promovendus Yiran Yang.

How did “free agents” (entrepreneurs operating outside of the myriad of interests of the centralized, state-sponsored monopolies) in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire react to the creation of colonial monopolies (royal monopolies and chartered companies) by the central states in the Early Modern…

Monday 29 January, the annual meeting of Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Safety and Security (LDE CSS) took place at Wijnhaven. The conference started with pitches of projects financed via seed money of LDE CSS. Followed by interaction in small groups to formulate research and education topics for the…

Lizzy van Dorp enrolled at Leiden University in 1893 to study Literature. But the ambitious student changed path and became the first woman in the Netherlands to study law.

Aristotle's Poetics: the oldest and most influential work of western literary theory.

The University of Limerick (Ierland) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to explore aspects of nonconformity and deviance in the early modern world of learning. Deadline for proposals: May 11.

Scientist looked for the genetic footprint of fire use in our genes, but found that our prehistoric cousins - the Neanderthals - and even the great apes seem better at dealing with the toxins in smoke than modern humans.

An interdisciplinary and innovative research group combining History, underwater archaeology, GIS and wood provenancing methods.

Two Vidi subsidies for Faculty of Archaeology.

On Thursday 29 January 2026 Uğur Derin successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In a new article in the journal Scientific Reports, Leiden archaeologist Wei Chu and colleagues report on recent excavations in Western Romania at the site of Româneşti, one of the most important sites in southeastern Europe associated with the earliest Homo sapiens. The site gives an important glimpse…

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For a long time, even many researchers thought that guide dogs were a relatively modern invention. An accidental encounter with archival material showed university lecturer Krista Milne that guide dogs helped their blind owners as far back as the Middle Ages. Milne now has received an NWO XS grant to…

The central aim is examining gender differences in recorded crime, particularly in relation to interpersonal violence, in early modern Bologna.

Radboud University is looking for a PhD researcher who will investigate the afterlife of medieval thought in early modern Europe through the study of concrete instances of intellectual transfer, for instance the appropriation of specific medieval authors or early modern revaluations of specific themes…

How did nineteenth century scholars evaluate each other and each other’s work through more or less informal practices of peer review?

The Life in Custody (LIC) Study comprises a large-scale research project into prison climate and the quality of prison life in Dutch prisons.

What is the size and composition of the Dutch urban mine? How will the urban mine develop over time, and how can it be used as a source of materials as part of a circular economy?

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

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.

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.

Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions research area will be presented on 9 September, in the form a conference. The keynote speaker is Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of the Asia Research Institute of the Singapore National University. The title of his address is Sustainability and…

The Historia Naturalis Brasiliae Reconsidered