The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested?

On the 6th of July, Anthony Jakob successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Anthony on this achievement!

In this paper, Kantorowicz aims to track the persistent effect of former partitioning borders on property tax rates in Poland.

Show People offers a comprehensive history of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

Bringing together the most current research on the relationship between crime and gender in the West between 1600 and 1914, this authoritative volume places female criminality within its everyday context.

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

They existed and were important, but for too long they have remained invisible in historiography: women. Ariadne Schmidt, the Magdalena Moons endowed professor, researches the history of urban culture in Leiden. Women take pride of place in her research. Inaugural lecture on 28 February.

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

Her part-time job as a city guide in Dordrecht opened Lotte Hamm's eyes: not business administration, but history was her dream study. This semester she starts her bachelor's degree.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Ariadne Schmidt will be appointed professor by special appointment of the Magdalena Moons chair at Leiden University. From 1 September 2018 she will carry out academic research and teach on the cultural history of the city, in particular of Leiden.

In which way was literary celebrity constructed in the nineteenth century and what forms of fandom were there?

The aim of this research is to understand the linking of crises for the combination of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Masses of hamburgers, steaks, cheese and a lot of eggs: Americans love their animal products. But researcher Oliver Taherzadeh discovered that only a relatively small group of high-volume consumers need to modify their diet to achieve an enormous environmental gain.

The transformation of the myriad of medieval kingdoms, principalities, local lordships, city-‘states’ and peasant ‘republics’ into ‘modern’ states, claiming some measure of sovereignty, remains one of the core themes of European history, because it gets down to the very root of the (idea on the) Europe…

Ben Van Rompuy, assistant professor of EU competition law, was an invited expert at the 23th Latin American and Caribbean Competition Forum (LACCF) organised in Quito, Ecuador on 28-29 September 2023.

Envoys jumping out of windows, fights, and illegal diplomacy: history student Tessa de Boer encountered them all while writing her master's thesis on Amsterdam as a diplomatic city during the 17th and 18th centuries. For her thesis, she was awarded the Uitgeverij Verloren/Johan de Witt thesis prize…

Through each individual decision, however small, people make history. This is what historian Katja Happe said in the Cleveringa Lecture on 26 November. She illustrated this with individual reactions to the persecution of Jews during the Second World War.

Prof. Giles Scott-Smith has made the first History MOOC (Massive Online Open-Access Course) produced by Leiden University. The MOOC 'The Rooseveltian Century', which covers the influence of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt through the 20th century, is now online at Coursera. The successful MOOC…

On 8 November 2021 YAL organized the successful symposium Interdisciplinary Research: Challenges and Opportunities.

Jeff Fynn-Paul, lecturer at Leiden University’s Institute for History, was recently awarded the European History Quarterly’s 2016 Prize for his article “Occupation, Family, and Inheritance in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona: A Socio-Economic Profile of One of Europe’s Earliest Investing Publics.”

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

To what extent was labour-induced migration important to the functioning of the towns and cities of Roman Italy?

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500 provides a comprehensive survey of this complex and varied formative period of European history, covering themes as diverse as barbarian migrations, the impact of Christianisation, the formation of nations and states, the emergence of an expansionist commercial…

The Dutch scientist prof. dr. Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Leiden Observatory, Leiden University and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, will receive the 2018 James Craig Watson Medal from the american National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Moving Romans offers an analysis of Roman migration by applying general insights, models and theories from the field of migration history.

The left is gaining more and more ground on the political map of Latin America, with the elections in Colombia as the most recent example. But what’s behind this pull to the left? Professor of Modern Latin American History Patricio Silva talks about the current political situation in the region.

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

To what extent did the street patterns in urban districts influence crime patterns?

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

What are the origins of the Islamic Empire? And what was daily life like there? Two new Ted Ed animations answer these questions in simple language. Arabists Petra Sijpesteijn and Birte Kristiansen explain what the process of developing the videos was like.

This project focuses on urban commercial space in Roman Italy and deals with the impact of economic growth on urban communities in the late Republic and the Imperial period (200 BCE – 300 CE).

The multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying artistic, literary, political and religious ideologies.

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world, when, how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities?

When we think of the history of Dutch slavery, the areas that spring to mind are primarily the Antilles and Suriname. However, until the end of the eighteenth century there were also Dutch plantation colonies in neighbouring Guyana. Bram Hoonhout’s book ‘Borderless Empire’ describes this forgotten h…

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

My current research focuses on criminality and gender interactions in nineteenth-century Europe. This project uses a comparative methodology to explain gender constructions in a criminal and in a court setting.

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?