Adolescence: Sexual Becoming in Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
On 24 and 25 April 2025, the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam — home to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) — hosted an interdisciplinary workshop organized by dr. Rafal Matuszewski, an ancient historian at the Institute for History in Leiden.
Supported by the KNAW Early Career Partnership Award, the event brought together scholars from a remarkable range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, biopsychology, and neuroscience, as well as from institutions across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States of America, and Canada.
Titled The Social and Cultural Construction of Adulthood and Sexual Maturity: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the workshop explored how societies across time and space have understood, experienced, and regulated the passage into adulthood. Fourteen papers examined diverse themes such as rites of passage, legal and medical definitions of maturity, gendered expectations, bodily development, and the broader implications of recent neuroscience research. The contributions collectively challenged the idea of universal developmental benchmarks, instead highlighting how historical, cultural, political, and scientific contexts shape the norms and meanings of sexual maturity and adulthood.
Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities was well represented: in addition to the organizer, dr. Rafal Matuszewski, the workshop included contributions from dr. Marlisa den Hartog and dr. Andrew DJ Shield from the Institute for History, as well as prof. dr. Ying Zhang and dr. Angelika Koch-Low from LIAS — all adding valuable perspectives from their respective fields to the vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue.
What made this event especially significant was the depth of exchange it fostered across disciplinary boundaries. Participants engaged critically and collegially with one another’s work, building bridges between the humanities and the sciences and enriching collective understanding of a topic with profound academic and societal implications. As a key outcome of the workshop, a collective volume — provisionally titled A Global History of Sexual Becoming — is now in preparation and will feature selected contributions from the event.
Events like this highlight the importance of international collaboration and the richness that comes from interdisciplinary dialogue.
