Categories of gender and sexuality are the subject of heated debates in our everyday lives. To understand how systems of gender and sexuality operate, and why these are such contested areas we need to study these categories came about historically.

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies.

Subproject of

In this study I explore literary structures of identity-formation in the works of assimilated/acculturated Jewish writers: Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” (“Die Verwandlung”, 1912) and David Vogel’s Hebrew novel Married Life. 1929).

This research examines the social, political, and cultural forces that structure people’s responses towards accented speech, and further uses the accent as a focal point to theorize the interrelation between language and body.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

'The World Upside Down. The Geographical Revolution in Humanist Commentaries on Pliny's Natural History and Mela's De situ orbis (140-1700)', in: Enenkel, K.A.E. & Nellen, H. (Eds.), Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400-1700).Humanistica…

This study interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential.

The figure of the barbarian has captivated the Western imagination from Greek antiquity to the present. Since the 1990s, the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism has taken center stage in Western political rhetoric and the media. But how can the longevity and popularity of this opposition be accounted…

Victorian Fairy Tales

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Greek culture in the Roman world.

This research project analyses the use of different, often competing, stereotypical images of Rome in Humanist Latin Poetry, by considering it as strategic appropriation of the classical heritage.

‘The Survival of Pliny in Padua. The Botanical Renaissance and the Transformation of Classical Scholarship’ in: Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, ed. by K.A.E. Enenkel. Intersections 29 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, forthcoming autumn 2013), pp. 327-62.

The purpose of LENS is to foster, coordinate and support research of visual media of analog and digital photography, film, and video, and the visual arts.

This Festschrift in honour of Cary J. Martin

The MA Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University is a one-year, full-time programme taught entirely in English. With over four centuries of expertise in Middle Eastern scholarship, this programme offers you cutting-edge insights into the region’s history, politics, religion, languages, and culture…

Combining cutting-edge quantitative approaches with more traditional book history approaches, this new book offers the first history of medieval manuscript destruction in England from the medieval period to the present.

The programme consists of four fields of study which are outlined below.

If you’ve graduated from the programme and you want to further your academic education you can continue with a master’s programme. It will earn you the title of Master of Arts (MA) and significantly increase your chances of finding a position at academic level.

This collection brings into conversation several kinds of scholarship on medieval authorship which have tended to remain separate over the last two to three decades, a period of steadily increasing scholarly interest in this topic.

Arabic and its Alternatives discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion and communal identities in the Middle East in the period following the First World War.

An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Genius of Invective is a peerless example of the breadth, depth, and complexity of the Arabic classical literary tradition. It was once one of the most popular works of Arabic literature, read across all regions from Mauritania to India, from Istanbul to Zanzibar. This volume marks the first English–Arabic…

Central to the research of several cluster members are the social function and contexts of the production and consumption of medieval and early modern art, literature and media:

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

Engin Kiliç defended his thesis on 11 june 2015

Inspired by a critical reconsideration of current monolithic approaches to the study of Greek religion, this book argues that ancient Greeks displayed a disquieting capacity to validate two (or more) dissonant, if not contradictory, representations of the divine world in a complementary rather than…

This book examines how renewed forms of artistic activism were developed in the wake of the neoliberal repression since the 1980s.

The Animated Image addresses the entire range of contexts in which images were described by Roman authors as being animated, as well as the accounts that Roman writers produced to explain the animation of inanimate matter.

Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry and allow us to understand…

In the History of the Roman Emperors, what does Herodian’s method of composition consist of and how does it relate to his writing intention, particularly in terms of political and moral idea(l)s?

Çağlar Köseoğlu, MA student Literary Studies, has received the Fulbright Graduate Student Grant intended for students who want to study for a master’s degree or a PhD in the United States. He will do a one-year MA called Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts.

How De Haan is using language in general and his specific style of language in particular to provide truth, solidarity and justice for both the individual and the collective?

Leiden University offers its students a wide range of bachelor's, master's and minors that explore sustainability or climate. Here, you find an overview of those programmes in the academic year 2020-2021.

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

The center studies the many ways in which issues of law and justice are dealt with in art and literature with a focus on liminal issues and cases. These are issues and cases where law comes to the limits of what it is capable of dealing with and art and literature explore the implications of what is…

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

In the master’s programme in Dutch Discourse Studies at Leiden University you will study rhetoric and argumentation, and you will specifically focus on research into pragmatics, stylistics, genre research and persuasion.

This dissertation examines how Benedictine monks at the Abbey of Fécamp designed, produced, and read books over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The MA Neerlandistiek/Dutch Studies at Leiden University provides you with an international view on the Dutch language and culture. You will be able to study the full breadth of Dutch studies: from the Middle Ages to today.