Leiden University opened its doors on Leiden Museum Night, with a whole host of things to see and do at the Academy Building, Hortus botanicus and Old Observatory. Take a look at the photos and see.

Ten Leiden museums and heritage institutions have curated the online exhibition ‘Carel’s Universe’. They selected objects from their collections that symbolise retiring Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker and the research in Leiden. With direct references, playful associations and the odd nod and wink.

Most people would not even consider it, starting a PhD at the age of 62. However, for the former Teylers Museum curator Bert Sliggers it was like a dream that came true: ‘The opportunity I was given felt like a gift, it brought me and Teylers Museum a lot.’

Bringing Dominican indigenous collections back to the community

The ninth Museum Night in Leiden will take place on Friday 19 May 2017. This year's theme will be 'About time'. Nine museums are taking part and the city centre will be brightly lit.

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.

The strangest things come out at night. This is the motto of the Leiden Museum Night due to take place on 28 May. Leiden University is once again playing a key part.

Museum Night on Saturday 28 May is a good opportunity to discover the unique museums in Leiden. Thirteen museums will open their doors and give visitors the chance to experience these locations in a different light.

A rejuvenated Naturalis opens its doors to the public on Saturday 31 August. Many researchers from Leiden University also work at the Naturalis research centre. Their workplace has also undergone a major facelift, and museum visitors can now watch their every move.

The research focuses on the understanding of symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain (one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico), by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands.

One of the highlights during the fieldwork in Schoningen lead by Prof. dr. Thijs van Kolfschoten in 2013 was the opening of the museum and research center paläon on June 24. To the realisation of the museum, the Faculty of Archaeology made ​​a significant contribution. Many of the results of the research…

This project investigates diversifying and democratizing heritage through practices of “home-making”. We propose to research ‘home-making’ as a non-binary practice of combining memories of roots and routes, dwelling in the present, and desires for the future.

On Tuesday 7 December, Wouter Kalf gave a lecture on how All Knowlegde starts with intuïtions for the Studium Generalis series co-hosted by the Museum de Lakenhal. The lecture was in Dutch.

Replicas of artworks by world-famous artist and political activist Banksy are being exhibited at several locations in Amsterdam without the permission of the anonymous graffiti artist. Dirk Visser, Professor of Intellectual Property Law, says this is ‘clearly copyright infringement’.

Natalia Grincheva (2020). Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8153-6999-8, 164 pp., £27.99 (paperback).

Where does the urge to collect come from? What are the explicit or underlying reasons for gathering large amount of objects?

On a thursdaymorning our students were guided around a new exhibition in the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo. This exhibition displayed photographs and documents from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Western Arabian Peninsula.

You can find an overview of events organized by the Platform for Post-Colonial Readings below.

The exhibition Leiden celebrates – 450 years of parades at Museum De Lakenhal shows how parades and society have changed through the centuries. Alumnus and historian Danielle van Goethem worked on the exhibition. She gives a preview.

The type of question that museums ask about objects in their collection influences conversations between parents and children. Researchers from Leiden University and Naturalis Biodiversity Center studied how questions influence conversations. Publication in Visitor Studies on 2 July.

The art installation by Peter van der Putten and Jeroen van der Most was selected from nearly 500 submissions for an exhibition on climate change.

Contemporary Maya Calendars

Soil ecologists Emilia Hannula (Leiden) and Elly Morriën (UvA) received the Golden Medal of Teylers Tweede Genootschap on 5 November. They received the prize for their submission to a competition on sustainable soil management.

Sharing Collections and Connecting Histories

The Historia Naturalis Brasiliae Reconsidered

Representing Japanese Colonial 'Heritage' in Taiwan

This dissertation approaches collections of Andean mummies in European national and university museums as the focus to understand the relationship between objects, documents, and the practice of collecting in the period from 1850 to 1930. Over 200 mummies, kept by 18 different museums in Western European…

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.

The chief curator of the National Museum of Ethnology, Laura van Broekhoven, is participating in the Museum Leadership Institute at the Claremont Graduate University.

Ralph Keuning, the former director of Museum de Fundatie, a museum for the visual arts in Zwolle, stepped down in 2022 following complaints about authoritarian leadership. On top of that, an independent investigation has shown that he received almost €200,000 from the struggling museum after his departure.…

Like many others, Ruurd Halbertsma has had a rollercoaster of a year. His museum, the National Museum of Antiquities (RMO), was closed for a long while because of the lockdown. Visitor numbers picked up again from September, but it the next few weeks will be tense now the hospitals are full again. Halbertsma:…

This year’s “best master’s thesis in the area of national or international history” was written by Bareez Majid, who has completed a research master's in Middle Eastern Studies. She wins the prestigious 2015 Volkskrant–IISG thesis prize for her courageous, solid research on a former “torture prison”…

A global perspective on the nature and evolution of nationalism, from the early modern era to the present.

Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

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.

The project ‘Founding an Inclusive Space’ investigates the histories of various LGBT+ archives in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Doctoral research on the history of the critical visitor and their efforts at founding alternative archives including LGBT+-focused, feminist, disability and digitizing projects, resulting in a traveling exhibition on findings (with audio-guides), popular and scholarly article, and a dissertation.

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project.

Visualizing the internal structure is a crucial step in acquiring knowledge about the origin, state, and composition of cultural heritage artifacts. Among the most powerful techniques for exposing the interior of cultural heritage objects is computed tomography (CT), a technique that computationally…

With the aid of the General History of Africa (GHA) series of books, PhD candidate Larissa Schulte Nordholt researched what it meant to decolonise the history of Africa. This proved to be a tricky process, which was hampered by politics and lack of funding. PhD defence on 1 December.