In educational settings such as museums, universities and schools, white, male, able-bodied and rational subjects still dominate. Although there has been a lot of theoretical work on processes of in- and exclusion through racialization, sexualization, and disabilization, we still know very little about…

Technological advances have an impact on our daily lives. They have also been employed by governments to manage border security, especially at controversial border crossings. Fences, heat sensors, heat cameras, drones and other hi-tech equipment that are currently being tested collectively produce a…

ACPA alumnus Budhaditya Chattopadhyay explores sound practices across South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America in his new publication 'Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues'.

In Poland the commemoration of acts of resistance is being misused to distort the history of the Holocaust. That is what Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski said in his inaugural lecture on 26 November. In her lecture, the second Cleveringa Professor, Barbara Engelking, pointed to the often indifferent…

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa, who died on 5 december 2013, received an honorary doctorate from Leiden University in 1999. Mandela’s response was modest: ‘It is not a personal achievement. It is a tribute to all those who emerged from underground, from prison, from exile...’

How do insurance products transform intimate and personal relations? What are the consequences of the classifications that insurance companies use and how do these affect solidarity, morality and inequality?

The Centre for Indigenous America Studies (CIAS) at Leiden University is designed to coordinate and promote the teaching and research of Indigenous languages, literatures, cultures and cultural heritage.

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Who is Economic Man? Every economic paradigm presupposes an anthropology, a theory of human nature. This project explores the anthropologies presupposed and produced by ancient Greek economic texts, and the specific knowledge forms that shape these anthropologies.

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

This special issue of Media History (22-3/4, 2016), co-edited with Helmer Helmers (University of Amsterdam), develops a new perspective on the early modern communication revolution. It discusses news as a specific kind of information – by its nature continuous, unreliable, and diffuse – which needed…

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Lions in West and Central Africa form a unique group, only distantly related to lions in East and Southern Africa. Biologists at Leiden University confirm this in an article published in Scientific Reports.

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

Conducting research on reliability of journalism and the trust in media.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

This book explores how changes in the patterns of cooperation and conflict among states, regional actors and transnational non-state actors have affected the rise of emerging global powers and the suggested decline of US leadership. Scholars, students and policy practitioners who are interested in the…

Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria - South Africa

How did colonial law work to turn people into property? This project argues that colonial ideas about households and domestic authority were critical to legal processes of enslavement in the early modern Dutch empire. Using colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas, the project…

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…

Within the scope of innovating and connecting – the theme of our new Strategic Plan – I paid a visit to Brussels last week. It is important to give Leiden University a face in Brussels and to show our expertise, on Africa for instance.

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

Leiden’s expertise on the Middle East spans from ancient history to contemporary tensions in the region. By studying languages, cultures, religions, literature, art, and philosophy in in conjunction, we create an indispensable, in-depth understanding.

The historiography of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is dominated by the personal clash between the principal negotiators, Harry Dexter White of the United States and John Maynard Keynes of Britain.

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

Regulating Relations: Controlling Sex and Marriage

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University proudly establishes the Blaise Pascal chair. The chair applies for one year and is meant to strengthen the cooperation of the Leiden computer science research with foreign institutes.

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

In this project we ask: how does pollution manifest as part of different practices, both socially and materially.

The European Research Council (ERC) announced the awarding of 494 Starting Grants to young scientists across Europe. One of these scholars is Corinna Jentzsch, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science. She received this grant for her research project ‘Countering…

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

During the project, this page will be updated with news updates and events organised as part of the research project.

The second major collection of papers from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

The emergence of the Köprülü household that imprinted its stamp on the latter half of the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire. What is the power struggle they carried out against Ottoman dynastic power?

Is it possible to formulate a new conceptual foundation for attributing an evaluative role to historiography of science, without relinquishing the historiographic sensitivity of recent work in the discipline?

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' analyzes Greek economic thinking in late 5th- and 4th-century philosophical circles.