Indigenous Peoples possess unique perspectives of the world that will be lost if their knowledge and heritage are not documented, studied and protected. If we lose this knowledge, we are losing part of our own heritage.

The head of MCS is also Director of the Leiden-based LDE Centre for Global Heritage and Development, President of LeidenGlobal, and staff member of the Heritage and Museums department of the Faculty of Archaeology. Joint activities are being developed at the interface between heritage and museum stu…

The Colonial and Global History Research Programme of the Leiden University Institute for History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

Opportunities, challenges, and future perspectives of people-centered approaches in dynamic historic urban landscapes

The master’s programme in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University offers the most in-depth and comprehensive programme on the history of colonialism and globalisation currently available in Europe.

Engagement between Asia and Europe is increasing. If these continents want to build a lasting relationship, they need to understand each other better in the economic, socio-cultural, historical and legal arena. Researchers from Leiden have already contributed to the body of knowledge on past and present…

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…

The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide.

Bringing Dominican indigenous collections back to the community

The Colonial and Global History (research) programme at Leiden University offers the most in-depth and comprehensive programme of European expansion and globalisation currently available in Europe.

The major objective of the study is to ascertain how Japanese colonialism affected the manner in which food was produced, processed, prepared and consumed in the colony, and how new attitudes towards these practices were constructed.

This dissertation presents a legal geographical analysis of the heritage laws of the independent English-speaking islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Master

global challenges and possibilities

Museums are powerful and influential institutions in their ability to shape knowledge and contribute to our identity. What we preserve and how we present our collections and heritage is closely connected to our identity and culture. In the multidisciplinary Museums, Heritage and Collections, you'll…

At the initiative and expense of His Royal Highness King Willem-Alexander, Leiden University will be conducting a study of the role of the House of Orange-Nassau in Dutch colonial history. The project will run from 2023 to 2026.

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…

The aim of this PhD dissertation project is to study the effect of private foreign investment outside the realm of economics in the context of a colonial structure in Indonesia between c. 1910 and c. 1960.

This thesis explores the value of cultural and archaeological heritage through a focus on multinational corporations (MNCs) across industries and their involvement with cultural heritage.

Objects and framings of heritage, archives, and academic knowledge production generate worldwide, fierce societal debates on the legacies of colonial violence, past injustice and present-day institutional racism. Whether bronzes from Benin, daggers from Bali, fossils from Java, photo-albums from…

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

This pilot project will initiate research on how heritage has been and can be mobilized to address climate change governance in Himalayan Asia. Climate adaptation strategies frequently include the sourcing of heritage, encompassing landscapes, built environments 4 and cultural practices. However, effective…

Lecture

The fourth volume of Ex Novo has the pleasure to host Heleen van Londen, Marjo J. Schlaman, and Andrea Travaglia as guest editors of the special issue titled The Natural and The Cultural. Integrating Approaches in Landscape Heritage Management. This timely collection of peer-reviewed papers and short…

The researchers and students at the Department of Archaeological Heritage and Society at the Faculty of Archaeology study the role of the past in modern societies. They want to find out more about the relationships between the past and the present, and the role that heritage plays.

The proposed research program studies the impact of private foreign investment on development in Indonesia during the years c. 1910-1960.

Colonial and Global History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The project GRADIENTS investigates what it meant to be European in colonial Africa where identification as European often did not depend on skin colour and was understood on a spectrum with many gradients.

The 2011 disasters precipitated widespread concern among heritage scholars about the fate of Tohoku’s cultural properties, tangible and intangible. Damage to not only buildings and landscapes but also ‘formless’ heritage, some worried, could weaken social infrastructure and thus slow or undermine re…

The Heritage and rights of indigenous peoples focuses on the living heritage of indigenous peoples and its safeguarding, connecting the past and the present in local communities.

A study of Dutch Fort at Galle, Sri Lanka

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.

The Centre for Digital Heritage undertakes collaborative international research in the field of Digital Heritage. It is an initiative of the University of York.

In Europe a number of production and communication strategies have long tried to establish local products as resources for local development. At the foot of the Alps, this scenario appears in all its contradictions, especially in relation to cheese production. The Heritage Arena focuses on the saga…

The master's programme in Heritage and Museum Studies at Leiden University focuses on the relationships between past and present, the role of heritage in our society, and how our heritage can contribute to improving the quality of life and the environment.

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,…

This volume provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of the archaeology of a single Caribbean island yet published. Drawing together scholars from the Caribbean, north America and Europe, all working from a range of disciplines within the broader scope of archaeology, and drawing upon recent…

Daniel Stumm defended his thesis on 16 April 2020.

Emily Wolff, PhD candidate at Leiden University, wrote a paper about the inclusion of imperial citizens in the Dutch post-war welfare state.

Archaeological and Anthropological perspectives

In White Lies and Black Markets, Fatah-Black offers a new account of the colonization of Suriname—one of the major European plantation colonies on the Guiana Coast—in the period between 1650-1800.

This book questions the accepted origins of the field of International Relations (IR). Commonly understood to have emerged from the horrors of WW1 with the goal of bringing about world peace, the authors argue that on the contrary, IR came from a somewhat less noble tradition – that of the Round Tab…