This ethnographic research is a joint project with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, and KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. It aims to understand the experiences of social inclusion and exclusion of female migrants…

How can we monitor and protect biological and cultural diversity in Suriname best? What can we learn from local knowledge and customs associated with biodiversity? How can we understand current species, acoustical, behavioural, and ecological diversity from an evolutionary perspective? Can we predict…

The material and intellectual presence of Egypt is at the heart of Western culture, religion and art from Antiquity to the present. This volume aims to provide a long term and interdisciplinary perspective on Egypt and its mnemohistory, taking theories on objects and their agency as its main point of…

This research develops and applies a new approach to study Aegyptiaca Romana from a bottom-up, Roman perspective.

Many handwritten and illustrated archives contain a wealth of information, but are largely underexplored because they are complex and difficult for computers to decipher. The aim of this project is to develop a digital environment that resolves this challenge and connects heterogeneous archival content…

On 1 September 2022 Afke van Ewijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

How and to what extent the historic house (re-)constructs identity through image-making in China.

Filipino anthropologists Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga look back at the groundbreaking Netflix show Trese and what it missed about the stories of Indigenous peoples. They published the article 'What Netflix Got Wrong About Indigenous Storytelling' in the digital Anthropology magazine…

Around the sixth and seventh centuries, South and Southeast Asia saw a great religious change: Saivism largely took over from Vaisnavism. We’re going to look at the way in which Saivism, the religion of the god Siva, presented itself with respect to Vaisnavism. In particular we’ll investigate the role…

PhD defence

How do speakers adapt to multilingual contexts?

Exploring the language of the lower classes in the nineteenth century

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world.

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.

As part of Nexus 1492 Subproject 4: A Future for Diverse Caribbean Heritages, which seeks to shed light on how local communities interpret and engage with heritage in the present day, this doctoral study aims to gain insight into how indigenous heritage is represented in the school curriculum for social…

With her background in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leonie Siepmans brings a unique perspective to the corporate world. Find out what an anthropologist does in a big company.

In October, Sophie Starrenburg was elected as a member of the Coordinating Committee of the ESIL Interest Group on the International Law of Culture. She will work alongside Giovanni Carlo Bruno (Italian National Research Council), Andrzej Jakubowski (Polish Academy of Studies), and Lucas Lixinski (University…

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a major multidisciplinary research project which aims to re-vision the history of Asia in one of its most significant periods. The project is based at the British Museum, British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and…

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

This study employs a comparative perspective to identify generic and specific qualities of petitions and petitioning. It charts the chronological development of petitioning practices over centuries. The interdisciplinary approaches provide range of conceptual and methodological expertise for reade…

Leiden-Yale collaboration uncovers a tale of samurai same-sex love in a library manuscript.

Presenting case studies by both senior and emerging scholars, it makes mandatory reading for anyone interested in the challenges of governance, citizenship and development faced by the people of India’s North East.

Archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois received an NWO Vidi grant to investigate the emergence of a pan-European culture in the third millennium BC. ‘We see ideas being shared across the entire continent in pre-literate societies. And not only that, for a thousand years, the same cultural ideas persist.’

Intensive 5-day programme on the world-famous Antwerp-based printing and publishing house founded by Christopher Plantin in 1555. International experts will discuss how it developed the production and distribution of religious books and related illustrations and prints in the following centuries.

When are you (sexually) mature? A KNAW grant will enable associate professor Rafal Matuszewski to organise an interdisciplinary workshop on this question.

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

The languages of the Mbam-et-Inoubou District of the Centre Region of Cameroon have a unique position in Bantu linguistics. Being in between

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

In August 2022 we welcome our new colleague Dr Letty ten Harkel as Assistant Professor in Roman and Post-Roman Archaeology. For the past ten years she has built up an impressive track record in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Read the interview about her background and research…

How can we work together to create a safe study and learning environment and offer students the support that they need? The Vision on Student Well-Being outlines the University’s plans to promote student well-being in the coming years.

The role of religion in the identity construction of LGBTQIA+ folks