Dutch-Caribbean research will get a boost. Gert Oostindie, working at the Institute of History and KITLV, has received a grant from NWO, consisting of 750,000 euros, for his research project 'Confronting Caribbean challenges: hybrid identities and governance in small-scale island jurisdictions'.

After a detour via the ANWB in Munich, alumna Manon Schouten works as a history teacher at two schools. ‘It's so rewarding to see the material resonate with students.’

Few people would associate the name Anton de Kom with Leiden. Yet the Surinamese freedom fighter is the subject of an exhibition at Museum De Lakenhal.

In Renaissance Florence, humanists wrote Latin poems fashioning their city as the new Rome, and members of the Medici family as Roman rulers. How can we explain this practice?

Wouter Linmans is working on a PhD thesis on visions and fears of future warfare in Dutch society (1918-1939).

Nowadays they can cause the fall of ministers, but once upon a time receipts were a new phenomenon. Associate Professor Robert Stein is to receive a grant from NIAS to map their origins.

Conference, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Lecture, Special Topics in Dialectology (2023)

At the Institute’s Council meeting of last December the first Institute’s biannual prize for teaching was awarded. The award is named after Carla Musterd, a former, highly valued, member of staff, who was famous for her unflinching dedication to teaching standards and excellence.

If there’s one place at the University where it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s De Kattekop. This, the University nursery, celebrates its 40th birthday in September. Its history reflects developments at the University. Parents are full of praise for it.

In her book Rap 73, Dorrit van Dalen shares intimate anecdotes and what for many are previously unknown stories about the Academy Building and its users. Stories such as who held heated debates in the beautiful vaulted Gewelfkamer, and why the singer of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot was given pride…

The Surinamese-Dutch language, Parbo Beer and, of course, football. The ‘Dear Aunt Olga’ (‘Lieve tante Olga’) exhibition focuses on the shared Surinamese-Dutch culture. Full of cheer and with life experience to spare, ‘icon’ Aunt Olga (95) leads visitors through a shared history and does not shy away…

A successful series of lectures on interior design, a symposium on four-poster beds and a new series of study afternoons on the horizon. University lecturer Alexander Dencher knows how to hold the attention of a growing audience. How does he do it? And what makes the history of interior design so fa…

In exactly 450 days’ time, on 8 February 2025, it is the university’s 450th anniversary. We are going to celebrate this with our students, staff, alumni and friends. In the run-up to the anniversary, we are compiling our top 450: Who or what is your favourite?

In 2013, Thijs Porck wrote a guest blog for 'medievalfragments'...

Catia Antunes is one of the main partners in the ‘ForSeaDiscovery – Forest Resources for Iberian Empires: Ecology and Globalization in the Age of Discovery’ project that has been awarded the prestigious Marie Curie – ITN grant for Academic/Civil Society training, cooperation and outreach.

A rare medieval bookmark emerged in Leiden University Library. Book historian Erik Kwakkel found the disk in an archive of manuscript descriptions called the Bibliotheca Neerlandica Manuscripta. It was likely put their in the early twentieth century by Willem de Vreese, who made the descriptions. The…

Het College van Bestuur laat door een postdoc een eenjarig vooronderzoek doen naar het koloniale en slavernijverleden van de Universiteit Leiden.

Lecture, COGLOSS

Lecture, COGLOSS

On 19 July Erik-Jan Zürcher, professor of Turkish languages and cultures, made a TV appearance in Nieuwsuur to talk about the actions Erdogan took after the failed coup.

What does the retail crisis mean for the future of Europe's urban centres? Assistant professor Alistair Kefford answers this very question in the French television programme 27.

Managing Diversity: Supervising Functions in Managing Colonial Workplaces

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.

Valedictory lecture

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

Lecture, Lectures in Historical Linguistics and Philology

This year marks the 450th anniversary of the Capture of Brielle by the Watergeuzen (lit. ‘Sea Beggars’) and therefore the birth of the Netherlands. Student Johan Visser is contributing to no fewer than three books about the extraordinary year of 1572.

Ali Al Tuma, PhD candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History, has won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity for his play ‘Yusuf Melik Espanya’ (Yusuf King of Spain), that tells the story of a young Moroccan whose brothers conspire to send him off, against his will, to the Spanish Civil…

Assistant professor Stephanie Noach has won the Dissertation Prize of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. She is receiving this prestigious prize for her research on darkness in contemporary art from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Richard Chancellor, the English Willem Barentsz, discovered the North Cape during the first English expedition to attempt to find a northeast passage. But the ship, the Edward Bonaventure, was ‘robbed by Flemings on its return in 1554.’ Historian Louis Sicking and legal expert Remco van Rhee found the…

Resilient Diversity: the Governance of Racial and Religious Plurality in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800

How did free agents cooperate with the VOC and the WIC, through lobbying for private interests within the Companies as well as at the highest political levels?

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

Oran Kennedy

Carolien Stolte has received an Early Career Award from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). She received this award for her research into the role of informal Afro-Asian networks in the Cold War. For this innovative research she received the award, an amount of 15,000 euros, and…

Take a walk through any city, and you are likely to come across a brightly coloured mural. Although these paintings often seem to serve solely as a backdrop for Instagram snapshots, art history professor Minna Valjakka says there are rich traditions and intricate histories that uncover more critical…

PhDArts candidate Ruchama Noorda will graduate on Wednesday 9 December 2015

In October 2014, Leiden University established the ‘Leiden University Teachers’ Academy’. Helen Westgeest, who lectures in the BA and MA Art History and MA Media Studies, was put forward by the Faculty of Humanities for appointment in the so-called ‘LTA’.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded a grant of 750,000 euros to the 'Visualising the Unknown in 17th-century Science and Society' project. Researchers will reconstruct how seventeenth-century scientists recorded and shared their groundbreaking microscopic discoveries. We…

82 years ago Queen Wilhelmina fled to England. Henk te Velde tells about her on the Australian radio show 'Nightlife'.

How can we best tell the current generations about some of the darkest parts of our past? To answer this question, researchers from Leiden are working with the Gedeeld Verleden, Gezamenlijke Toekomst foundation on public programmes about the Dutch history of slavery.