This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period.

This book provides an exploration into the historical transformations of women's interactions with state police in the Western world from 1800 to 1950.

Generations of Leiden students and academics have done archaeological research into the early medieval history of Oegstgeest. This makes this old settlement one of the best-documented sites from that era. In a new book, Leiden researchers take stock.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J.N. Kok, Co-Promotor: W.A. Kosters

This monograph by dr. Kim Beerden compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome.

A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World offers in-depth coverage of the most important topics in the study of Greek and Roman urbanism. Bringing together contributions by an international panel of experts, this comprehensive resource addresses traditional topics in the study of ancient cities,…

This thesis investigates Open-world Continual Learning (OWCL), a learning paradigm designed for intelligent systems operating in non-stationary environments with persistent exposure to unknown data.

Located in the small Kingdom of Commagene at the upper Euphrates, the late Hellenistic monument of Nemrud Daǧ (c. 50 BC) has been undeservedly neglected by scholars

The one-day symposium ‘War in Europe: the impact of Russian aggression in Ukraine two years on’ on 23 February 2024

What socio-cultural transformations did indigenous communities in the Lesser Antilles undergo from the late precolonial to the early colonial period in response to Amerindian­ European-African cultural encounters? How did Amerindian populations realign themselves in response to the colonisation…

This research project from Leiden University looks at the opportunities and threats that flow from the existence of institutional and normative diversity in the area of fundamental rights for the effective protection of those rights in a pluralist world.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

A new government, conflicts around the world and obviously a lot of science: these are the five stories about Leiden University that you enjoyed reading in 2024.

Explore how skateboarding functions as a prefigurative learning tool in 'Skate/worlds.' This volume examines skateboarding's therapeutic potential, its role in queering and decolonizing education, and its impact on parenting and care work through perspectives from writers, educators, and activists.

We are living in an information era where the amount of image and video data increases exponentially.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world.

This research profile area brings together descriptive, historical and theoretical linguistics, as well as psycho- and neurolinguistics.

Promotor: Prof.dr. I.A.G. Snellen, C.U. Keller

In her capacity as a lawyer and expert in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Professor Helen Duffy is filing a lawsuit against the Dutch State. Leiden University’s weekly newspaper Mare reports that through her role, Duffy is assisting a Palestinian Dutchman whose family was killed in…

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members. Angelo Romano, Matthias Sutter, James Liu, Toshio Yamagishi & Daniel Balliet studied national parochialism across different nations and conclude in their publication in Nature Communications that it is a ubiquitous…

This PhD project investigates the forms, functions, meanings, and socio-cultural values embedded in Palenda, in order to understand how it reflects and shapes the worldview of the Muna people (Mieno Wuna) through metaphor.

Professor of International Relations Daniel Thomas is clear: anyone taking peace in Europe for granted is shutting their eyes to reality.

Van Vark defended her dissertation 'Separation and immersion: the changing role of the armed forces in Northwestern liberal democracies’ on 17 October 2025. The doctoral research was supervised by Maartje van der Woude and Erwin Muller.

The Research Training Group “Byzantium and the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War” invites scholars to submit paper proposals for a series of sessions on “Perceptions of Just War in the Middle Ages” at the IMC 2025. These sessions aim to explore the diverse theological, philosophical, legal, and cultural…

At the start of his PhD, intelligence analyst William Lippert didn’t yet know what to expect. Little had been written on the subject. Three years later, he is sure: conventional arms control agreements promote peace.

Is our musicality unique? To find out, the Bird Singalong Project brings together singing parrots from all over the world. Do you have a parrot that sings or whistles along to songs and would you like to help us? Sing up now!

Frank van Vree, Emeritus Professor of War, Conflict and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UVA), is the new Cleveringa Professor at Leiden University this year.

The war in Ukraine is entering a new phase with the announcement of a partial Russian military mobilisation and the intention to annex four Ukrainian regions. Why is Putin making these decisions just now and what consequences will they have for the course of the war? We talk to professor and Russia…

Material Crossovers

As a student, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg was primarily interested in diplomacy surrounding conflicts. Through research on peace operations and subsequently the fight against guerrillas, he became increasingly involved with the most violent aspects of colonial warfare. Per 1 September 2024 he is appointed…

The World Politics Major at Leiden University College The Hague examines the big ideas and the powerful forces – political, military, economic, social and cultural – that shape the world at every level, from the global to the local and everything in between. Political conflict is a key driver of many…

This project compares and explains dynamics of cross-border cooperation among European actors in the field of counterterrorism (CT).

Emeritus professor of international law, Nico Schrijver, spoke on NPO Radio 1’s program Spraakmakers about the law of warfare and humanitarian law. He characterized the recent Israeli action that took place in Qatar as ‘brazen, because the attack affected not only Qatar and Hamas, but also the United…

Gert Oostindie, Emeritus Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History, is this year’s Cleveringa Professor at Leiden University. He was appointed by the University on 4 October. In his inaugural lecture on 24 November, entitled Courage and Disregard, he will talk about (academic) freedom in relation…

Damien van Puyvelde has received funding (over 47.000 euro) from a new Research Council pilot for his study 'Open-source research and the war in Ukraine: intelligence for the people by the people?' We asked the researcher five questions about this project and the opportunities this creates for him.

Three Dutch research institutes - including the Leiden University’s KITLV - will conduct a follow-up study on the use of violence during the Dutch East Indies war of decolonisation (1945 – 1950). The government has designated 4.1 million Euros for this study.

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

1000 Years of World History in 100 Old Maps.

Optimally solving real-world expensive Black-Box Optimization (BBO) problems w.r.t. real-world constraints, such as wall-clock time and computational costs, is extremely difficult and tedious.

The debate about state behaviour in cyberspace may be set in the wrong legal key.

In Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, Emeritus Professor Mineke Schipper reflects on myths about ‘the end’.

In this opinion article published in World Development, the authors present five research and policy priorities. While it is clear that ‘pluriversal’ designs need to guide the way forward (Kothari et al 2019), defining a set of key pillars can provide direction and purpose across this pluriversality.…