How have Muslims imagined the world before Muhammad? Stories about pre-Islamic times feature across all genres and periods of Arabic literature, and while many writers have derided the pre-Islamic past as disorderly paganism, others celebrate its memory as a time of Arab nobility and fine literature.…

Volume 4 and 5 of the Leiden series 'Dutch Sources on South Asia' are now available, written by Markus Vink (vol.4) and Carolien Stolte (vol.5).

Charisma K. Lepcha (PI, Sikkim University), Pradyut Guha (co-PI, Sikkim University), Rajib Sutradhar (co-PI, Christ University Bangalore) and Erik de Maaker (Leiden University) have been awarded a two-year grant of USD 18.000 to conduct research on the impact of ‘green farming’ on the sensitive mountain…

On 21 April 2021, Armin Cuyvers lectured students and staff of the University of Nairobi on EU law and comparative regional integration.

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

China-watchers are still grappling with the wide-ranging implications of the Hong Kong national security law. Has Beijing really abrogated the legally-binding Sino-British Joint Declaration after just 23 of the agreed-upon 50 years?

Below you will find an overview of all PRE-Classes provided by the various programmes of Leiden University. For each section, you can find a description of the content and more specific information about the requirements for participation in the Class.

What makes a good historian? When historians raise this question, as they have done for centuries, they often do so to highlight that certain personal attitudes or dispositions are indispensable or studying the past. Yet their vieuws on what virtues, skills or competencies historians need most differ…

In a modernist interpretation of migration controls, nation states play a major role. This book challenges this interpretation by showing that comprehensive migration checks and permanent border controls appeared much earlier, in early modern dynastic states and empires, and predated nation states by…

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

Since 2006, HJD has made an important contribution to shaping diplomatic studies as an international academic field. Our new HJD Diplomacy Reading List presents a diverse collection of analyses categorized into forty-five topics published in HJD over the years. We hope these lists prove a valuable resource…

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy calls for paper proposal submissions. Accepted papers will be included in the journal's special issue on Japanese diplomacy under the broad theme of 'Japan between the West and the East'.

On the 24th of November Aditi Mukherjee successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

NINO BA and MA Thesis Prize 2018

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial…

This study addresses and explains the issue of negative descriptions of the Arab Other in modern Iranian thought.

What invertebrates live in the fields and edges? Do the populations change with landscape complexity?

This volume sees the publication of fifty-six early Old Babylonian letters from ca. 1880 BCE. They were found by legendary Iraqi archaeologist Taha Baqir in 1941 at the site of Tell ed-Dēr, ancient Sippar-Amnānum, in central Iraq.

In this book, Vanessa Newby provides the first detailed examination of credibility’s essential place in peacekeeping.

Turkic nomadic rulers established large empires in the Middle East and Asia between the 11th and 14th centuries. This project will explore the link between their political ideology and the production of art and literature, via the cultural heritage of five cities along the Silk Road: Kashgar, Samarkand,…

At Leiden University you can study Islam and Muslim societies within two Dutch-language BA and various MA programmes and specializations.

In May-June 2014. large scale excavations were executed in Kampen on a cemetery belonging to a Medieval infirmary (Geertruidengasthuis) by the municipality of Zwolle in cooperation with the Laboratory of Human Osteoarchaeology. During the course of 11 days, the BA and MA students from Leiden University…

The study of language in change.

Kim Jong Il, leader of North Korea, is dead. His youngest son Kim Jong Eun is expected to be his successor. Remco Breuker, Leiden Professor of Korea Studies, gives a profile of the new leader.

Three Dutch research institutes - including the Leiden University’s KITLV - will conduct a follow-up study on the use of violence during the Dutch East Indies war of decolonisation (1945 – 1950). The government has designated 4.1 million Euros for this study.

External PhD candidate Annette Jenowein investigated how women have changed the meaning of gender by claiming their place in traditionally male-dominated domains. Her research focuses on the life of Charlotte Jacobs: the first woman to establish herself as an independent pharmacist in the Dutch East…

The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

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’.

On the 8th of September Yun-An Olivia Dung successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

A selected group of unpublished amulets from various collections in the world will be studied and edited.

Central to Nuranisa’s PhD project is the cultural diplomacy practiced by the Javanese courts of central Java (Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Pakualaman and Mangkunegaran) in response to the increasing Dutch colonial power in the 19th and early 20th century. The Javanese sultanates were incorporated into the…

This study explores regional variation in the use of utterance-final particles by analyzing spoken Taiwan Mandarin data recorded from spontaneous conversations.

The project seeks to come to an understanding of the archaeology of the desert and the ways in which its inhabitants engaged with their constraint, marginal environments through time. It compares and interprets site distribution and community organisation over a long time scale and across several different…

On October 11, the Austria Centre Leiden teamed up with the Leiden Jewish Studies Association to welcome Dr. Lena Sadovski for a lunch time talk. Fifteen colleagues from across the university, including retirees and graduate students, attended Dr. Sadovski's fascinating lecture entitled “When religion…

At our regular panel discussions we bring together scholars and other experts to discuss a current topic that captures the interest of the general public as well as academics.

Why follow the Middle Eastern Studies programme? Because it will improve your insight, expertise, and understanding of the region, the central debates and issues, and its interconnections with other regions, global issues, and processes. And why at Leiden University? Because thanks to our experts, expertise,…

Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Cuisine and Western Foodways

Dating back more than 400 years, Leiden University has the oldest continuous chair of Arabic outside the Arabic-speaking world. Today the MENA region is studied at Leiden from before the coming of Islam up to today from a wide array of disciplines. And Arabic is studied within the diverse linguistic,…

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

Piecing together the urnfield mortuary process in the Lower-Rhine-Basin, ca. 1300 - 400 BC

On young Muslims seeking to understand their place and make their way in a transformed world.

How does global change across time and space lead to convergence and loss of variation or increasing diversity and conflict?

The unique geographic and temporal breadth of research at Leiden allows us to stimulate a shift from the classical Weberian mode of scholarly production that views historical development and modernization as emanating from Europe and the West to a multi-polar perspective that allows for more nuanced,…

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

This is the first reference work to describe the history of embroidery throughout Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau and the Indian Subcontinent from the medieval period through to the present. It offers an authoritative guide to all the major embroidery traditions of the region and a detailed examination…

Two open letters are currently circulating among civil servants in the Netherlands calling for the Dutch government to take a different stance towards Israel. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law in Leiden, says in a national radio broadcast that this is an unusual and unique…