The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The way of Intersectionality. This project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility within their organization, collection, and exhibition spaces that meets the breadth of demands placed by today’s “critical visitors.” Fifteen…

The Centre for Global Heritage and Development has been successful in applying for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the topic of threatened heritage at ICTO, the platform for innovation and education at Leiden University.

Colonialism Inside Out: Everyday Experience and Plural Practice in Dutch Institutions in Sri Lanka (c. 1700-1800)

Call for Papers: Imperial Artefacts. History, Law, and the Looting of Cultural Property

Maritime History encompasses humankind’s relationships to the seas and oceans of the world.

Christopher Green defended his thesis on 26 February 2020

On 20 September 2023 Mark van de Water successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

Contemporary Maya Calendars

How should we address our colonial heritage? And how digital and accessible are our collections? Outgoing State Secretary Fleur Gräper spoke with researchers and heritage specialists about this on 25 January.

Watch and talk along with today’s science of the past during weekly Let’s Plays of popular games and vodcasts on the livestream platform Twitch.

How do Nepalese exiles in England celebrate their festivals? What are North Korean monuments doing in Zimbabwe? The ‘Heritage on the Move’ exhibition shows what happens to cultures under the influence of migration. From 3 December to 7 January in Leiden University's Oude UB.

Past, Present and Future of Nubian Communities in Sudan

What does it mean to be Aruban, Bonairian or Curaçaoan? In the Traveling Caribbean Heritage project historian Gert Oostindie studies this question together with PhD candidate Joeri Arion and heritage specialist Valika Smeulders. Other researchers and the islanders themselves are also collaborating…

Indigenous Peoples possess rich worldviews and unique knowledge that form part of our global heritage. Oppressing these peoples and violating their natural environment is leading to the destruction of this knowledge. Leiden researchers aim to counter this through collaborating with Indigenous Peoples…

As part of the VIDI 'Cultural innovation in a globalising society: Egypt in the Roman world', this research explores manifestations of Egypt in the material culture of Augustan Rome. This period was a crucial turning point for the urban landscape of Rome, which was characterised by cultural diversit…

Leiden and The Hague are home to many museums with large numbers of artefacts and archives. Leiden University also and the Leiden University Library also house special collections. Museums, Collections & Society stimulates research and education and raises ethical questions regarding the collections’…

Non-urban settlement organization and Roman expansion in the Roman Republic (4th-1st centuries BC)

This book explores the return of six outstanding Kandyan artefacts to Sri Lanka by the Dutch government in 2023. It captures numerous reflections of the international interdisciplinary research team that investigated the provenance of these artifacts and the remarkable layered history that the research…

The modern-day Caribbean is a stunningly diverse but also intricately interconnected geo-cultural region, resulting partly from the islands’ shared colonial histories and an increasingly globalizing economy.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

Learn about current approaches and ethical issues in heritage management and experience some of these in daily practice.

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

This book reveals how one publishing firm's editorial strategy helped to legitimate European colonialism in the early modern era.

This book explores the intellectual history of the Dutch empire from the sixteenth century to the postcolonial era, going beyond systemic thinkers to understand how empire was perceived in day-to-day life. It takes a transnational and transimperial approach to the Dutch empire, connecting European,…

A post-colonial approach to the concept of time in the past and present Maya culture

Lecture, Leiden University Nationalism Network

What are the immediate and lasting effects of the colonial encounters on indigenous Caribbean cultures and societies and what were the intercultural dynamics that took place during the colonisation processes? How can the study of indigenous Caribbean histories contribute to a more sophisticated awareness…

This project aims to explore the environmental impact of early Roman expansion (4th/3rd century BC) through a program of dating and ecological sampling of traces of field systems (centuriations).

This project focuses on Dutch registration of land and people in rural Sri Lanka. How did the practice of “fixating” the fluid social relations and dynamic daily practices into categories affect family strategies of reproduction and survival?

A Centre for Global Heritage will be set up at Leiden University, that integrates the unique global breadth and quality of academic expertise at the University and the Leiden Museums with the global infrastructure of practical consultancy expertise built up over the past years by the Centre for International…

Heritage Quest volunteers are awarded the second prize

Professor Simone Buitendijk, Vice-Rector Magnificus and member of the Executive Board of Leiden University, will be taking up a new position as Vice-Provost (Education) at Imperial College London on 1 August 2016.

Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie present a fresh look at the Dutch Atlantic in the period following the imperial moment of the seventeenth century. This epoch (1680–1815), the authors argue, marked a distinct and significant era in which Dutch military power declined and Dutch colonies began to chart…

The nineteenth-century writer Nicolaas Beets and his son Dirk were thoroughly colonial, Nicholas without ever having been to the Dutch Indies, or any other colony for that matter. But they didn’t realise it. The new Scaliger Professor, Rick Honings, shows that writers’ archives are a treasure trove…

How can heritage institutions make their organisations, collections and exhibitions more inclusive and accessible? University lecturer Eliza Steinbock will investigate this using a NWO Smart Culture grant.

Loss of cultural heritage first brings to mind the destruction in the Middle East. But in the Caribbean it is mainly natural processes such as coastal erosion and human interventions driven by economics that are damaging the local natural and cultural heritage. A conference is taking place on Bonaire…

The Ager Venusinus Project studies the relatively small number of recognized colonial dwellings dated securely to the period of colonization (i.e. the 3rd century BC). With a special interest in the Black Gloss ceramic typochronology

Paul van Enckevort defended his thesis on 3 June 2020.

Bordering Up: Regulating Mobility Through Passes, Walls and Guards

The Caribbean as we know it today is fundamentally a product of colonial activity and globalisation. Practically everyone that inhabits the Caribbean has ancestors from different continents due to colonial activity, which profoundly affects the area to this day. Caribbean writers, both in the Caribbean…

Imprint of Action is the first large-scale study focussing entirely on sociocultural impact in archaeology and, as such, is explorative in nature; it provides unique insights into the workings of interaction and participation in archaeological events, and openly shares qualitative and quantitative research…

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an extraordinary Chinese manuscript at auction in Hong Kong. It concerns an Imperial Edict (dated 1582) from the Ming dynasty period, at one time part of the former collection of well-known sinologist and author of detective-novels Robert van…