On 12 March (at 14.00) Nathan van Kleij will defend his dissertation at the University of Amsterdam. The title is: "Beyond the Façade: Town Halls, Publicity, and Urban Society in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries". It will be streamed online. Interested parties can obtain a link by mailing to: pro…

Five research projects of the Institute for History have been selected for the Research Traineeship Programme 2016-2017. The programme was initiated by The Faculty of Humanities to offer motivated students the opportunity to develop themselves in academic research. In December the research trainees,…

The Institute for History has a new academic director. Professor of Early Modern History Jeroen Duindam will take on this role from 1 September. ‘You can only do this job properly if you make time for it.’

Call for Papers: Imperial Artefacts. History, Law, and the Looting of Cultural Property

Dutch Title:

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

One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…

On 18 May 2011, Dr. Ben Knapen, Minister for European Affairs and International Cooperation, delivered the annual Van Vollenhoven Lecture on “Rule of Law and Development”.

This study presents a re-evaluation of Malay adventure stories.

Nobuaki Murai defended his thesis on 24 January 2018.

This project aims to study the Aesopian fable from 1500 to the present day in its complex relationship between text, illustration and education, adopting a broad, transnational perspective.

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

Over the last few years, human Rights have become subject of intense debates in historiography. Sam Moyn’s provocative book The Last Utopia (2010) made in particular clear how important it is to investigate precisely which meaning human rights have been given in a particular context. During the research…

In 2018, Megan Griffiths, then a student of the MA North American Studies, won the Theodore Roosevelt American History Award for her master’s thesis ‘Radicals, Conservatives, and the Salem Witchcraft Crisis: Exploiting the Fragile Communities of Colonial New England’.

Master studies History, Classics, Russian Studies and Dutch Studies have received the label ‘top programme’ in the Keuzegids Masters of March 2018. The study guide bases its results on the opinion of students (through the National Student Survey) and experts (NVAO).

European integration is under pressure. At the same time, the notion of a European administrative space is being explicitly voiced. But does a shared idea of the public servant exist in Europe?

This project investigates how the first generation of Dutch printed books (the incunabula, 1473-1501) affected late medieval spirituality, religious practice and visual culture in the Low Countries.

Museums have long focused on power, wealth and a few famous figures. But that is changing, says Valika Smeulders, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum. What this change comprises and how it has come about is the subject of her keynote speech at the D&I Symposium on 11 January.

Since 1 February 2016, Paul van Trigt is postdoctoral researcher in the project Rethinking Disability: the Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Global Perspective at the Institute for History.

The newly established Leiden Jewish Studies Association aims to bring together Leiden scholars working on Judaism. The first annual conference will take place in Leiden on 6 and 7 December. Leiden professors and co-organisers of the LJSA Sarah Cramsey and Jürgen Zangenberg talk about their plans.

Political scientists Rebekah Tromble and Michael Meffert (Leiden University) address the question why certain frames persist over time in the media while others fade away and still others disappear very quickly. They suggest an approach based in event-history methodologies for assessing the causes of…

In July 2021 the Leiden Empowerment Fonds (LEF) awarded a research grant of €13,500 for research into the history of maritime law in early modern times.

Tussen 14 en 30 september 2022 wordt Het Land van Belofte gespeeld door Theatergroep De Kale. Het Land van Belofte neemt u mee naar de groteske verhaalwereld van middeleeuwse pelgrims naar het Heilig Land. Het Land van Belofte is gebaseerd op het zestiende-eeuwse tafelspel Schipper, Pelgrim en Post.…

Fondazione 1563 launched a call for the Summer School of the Turin Humanities Programme, that will take place in Torino from September 6 to September 8 2023. The theme is: Writing global medieval history: comparative and connected approaches. Deadline for applications: June 25.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

We live in a data-drenched society awash with numbers. An inhabitant of the democratic polis of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.) increasingly found himself surrounded by numerical data. This project aims to analyze the communicative functions and the political meaning(s) ascribed to these public…

This project investigates the effects of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953) on the production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food in transwar Japan and Korea.

Anaïs Van Ertvelde is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for History. She is working on a thesis that investigates the cross-Iron Curtain impact of the UN International Year of Disabled Persons (1981).

This year the PhDs of the institute had their traditional day out (uitje) to The Hague. The last two years they had stayed in Leiden, so The Hague already seemed like quite the adventure. Indeed, it seems almost that as time progresses and more and more archives become digitized, history PhDs slowly…

Fanny Wonu Veys was appointed Professor of Art and Material Culture of Oceania on 1 August. Time for an introduction.

Before founding their American colony, the Pilgrim Fathers first lived in Leiden in the early 17th century. This group has no fewer than nine American presidents among its descendants. The University played an important role in the Pilgrims’ life in Leiden.

As part of Metamorfoze, the national digitalization project for the preservation of paper heritage, journals of The Van Vollenhoven Institute’s library have been digitized.

Metamaterials researcher Martin van Hecke was featured in the Dutch science tv show Atlas.

The Netherlands Institute in Morocco is open to students from all Dutch universities. Two students explain why they are spending a semester studying in Rabat.

Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker will head a delegation that is visiting Indonesia at the end of June. The visit is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of ‘Leiden’ institute KITLV-Jakarta. What does this institute do and why is Indonesia important to the University?

The Saxo Institute, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen (UCPH) invites applicants for a tenure-track assistant professorship in economic history

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

Peter Webb is one of the four young Leiden Humanities researchers to receive a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Webb will use the funding for his project EPIC PASTS: PRE-ISLAM THROUGH MUSLIM EYES, to reevaluate the ways in which Muslims in early Islam remembered…

On 21 October, Andrea van Leerdam will defend her thesis ‘Woodcuts as Reading Guides. How Images Shaped Knowledge Transmission in Medical-Astrological Books in Dutch (1500-1550)’. To register, send an email to woodcutsasreadingguides@gmail.com.

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

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…

Three alumni of our Master’s degree programme in Ancient History talk to us about how they found a job after graduation during the coronavirus pandemic. During the interview, Gabriël hung a huge board covered in post-it reminders behind his laptop, Molly was glad that the members of the selection committee…

From the birth of the universe to the molecules in a planet's atmosphere. The first five pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show the enormous range in which the space telescope can operate. Ewine van Dishoeck, professor of molecular astrophysics, took a look at the first images Tuesday…

Exploring cultural production in Europe, Latin America and Africa, the institute’s research programme focuses on the continuous interconnectedness of the Arts and Society in both the textual culture of literature, learning and public debate and the visual culture of art, architecture, film, photography…

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

This research programme seeks to understand the dynamics in the relationship between social media, mobile telephony and the social fabric under duress in Africa's mobile margins. It combines studies on mobility/migration, conflict and communication in an attempt to uncover these new dynamics, which…

On 4 December 2020 Fabiola van Dam will defend her dissertation "Het middeleeuwse openbare badhuis, fenomeen, metafoor en schouwtoneel" (Utrecht). To attend this event online please send an email to: fab.dam@usa.net (mentioning "4 dec" in the subject line).

Recently Cambridge University Press published dr. Jan Osters monograph “Media Freedom as a Fundamental Right”.

This volume, edited by Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen, discusses practices of memory in early modern Europe.