Argumentation and rhetorics is the study of how we convince people verbally. In other words, what do people say and how do they say it?

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Greek culture in the Roman world.

This project traces how, why, and under what circumstances scholars invoked the trope of “dogmatism,” especially in controversies. Relevant controversies from various fields, periods, and countries will be subjected to in-depth rhetorical analysis.

This timely and engaging book examines the rise of populism across the globe. Combining insights from linguistics, argumentation theory, rhetoric, legal theory and political theory it offers a fully integrated characterization of the form and content of populist discourse.

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

Subproject of

On the 24th of June, Martijn Wackers successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Martijn on this achievement!

This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context.

This article assesses Russian rhetoric toward Ukraine from 2004 to 2019 by analyzing statements by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On February 20th, Gulnaz Sibgatullina succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Gulnaz on this great result.

In February 2020 Jed Wentz will start the new course 'Practical Rhetoric: public speaking according to historical sources'. Registration is now open!

On March 12th, Jonathan Brown succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jonathan on this great result.

Just one year ago, nobody would have given Trump a cat's chance in the US presidential elections. Now he will be the next President of the United States. Professor of Journalism and New Media Jaap de Jong explains the rhetoric that has got Trump so far.

Saeedeh Shahnahpur defended her thesis on 13 September 2016.

Lecture, PCNI Research Group State of the Art Meeting

How do you make lobbying and rhetoric both challenging and understandable for high school students? Professor Jaap de Jong found the answer in climate activist Greta Thunberg. Together with his colleague Arco Timmermans, he developed a digital guest lecture on how to present a convincing story.

Drawing on a broad array of sources, this project examines modern retrievals of Bacon’s idols, thereby testing Justus von Liebig’s intriguing observation, back in 1863, that Bacon’s name lived on mainly in mottos or stereotypical phrases. More importantly, it examines the rhetorical purposes served…

What is the difference between a minister saying that something is possible or that it is not impossible ?

Everything you need to know about the minor Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media.

This project is a close and sensitive contextual study of Jacob of Sarug's (ca. 451-521 AD) metrical homily

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).

A source of inspiration for readers who are curious to understand how people move and convince each other

This collaborative project aims to explore the history of the concept “barbarism” in Europe from the 18th century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the role of literature and art in the concept’s shifting functions.

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

Louis Verreth and Jeroen De Keyser recently published a critical edition of Francesco Filelfo’s Latin translation of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (Edizioni dell'Orso).

This study interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential.

This book investigates how gay-identified immigrants and refugees experience feelings of inclusion or exclusion within a sexually-charged online subculture. Explores the response of ethnic minorities to demonstrations of racism and xenophobia within an intolerant European climate. Challenges political…

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.

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

In a podcast episode of 'New Books in History' Claire Weeda talks about her book 'Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion'.

An investigation into how racial stereotypes were created and used in the European Middle Ages.

De lichtheid van literatuur: Engagement in de multiculturele samenleving (The Lightness of Literature: Engagement in the Multicultural Society) is a plea for the social relevance of literature. The book delves into an age-old debate about literature and social engagement, which has recently been reinvigorated…

The figure of the barbarian has captivated the Western imagination from Greek antiquity to the present. Since the 1990s, the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism has taken center stage in Western political rhetoric and the media. But how can the longevity and popularity of this opposition be accounted…

The Centre is the proud home of several research programmes.

In the master’s programme in Dutch Discourse Studies at Leiden University you will study rhetoric and argumentation, and you will specifically focus on research into pragmatics, stylistics, genre research and persuasion.

This project tries to explain the persistence of this cultural repertoire by zooming in on (1) interaction between idioms (cultural repertoires) available to scholars at certain points in time, (2) mechanisms that help transmit repertoires across time and place, and (3) rhetorical purposes for which…

The Historical Acting Summer Academy, taught by historical actor Jed Wentz, gives students the chance to focus on the basic techniques of acting 1750-1850.

Lecture, Sociolinguistics series

In the field of Western art music, improvisation has become a much discussed topic. In this interdisciplinary study I argue that in this context, improvisation is not to be seen as a quasi-autonomous skill or art form, but as an aspect of music-making in general.

How was FDR's image constructed—by himself and others—as such a powerful icon in American memory?