The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

History is being taught at Leiden University since the days of Justus Lipsius [1547-1606]. In 1860, following the appointment of Robert Fruin as Leiden professor of Dutch History, modern historical investigation started in the Netherlands.

The Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) hosts two research journals and publishes the ISGA Reports series. Besides its own publications, researchers at ISGA also publish books or journal articles elsewhere. You can find all these external publications under Research output on the right.

The people behind The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and its online platform.

His Surinamese neighbours in Amsterdam gave Russia expert and economic historian Isaac Scarborough an idea: a re-evaluation of the Surinamese economy in the twentieth century. An NWO XS grant will enable him to make a start on this.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) took healthcare seriously, albeit mainly for business reasons. Former GP Ton Zwaard’s PhD research reveals that although healthcare in Asia was well organised, the VOC faced persistent problems for two centuries.

Richard Chancellor, the English Willem Barentsz, discovered the North Cape during the first English expedition to attempt to find a northeast passage. But the ship, the Edward Bonaventure, was ‘robbed by Flemings on its return in 1554.’ Historian Louis Sicking and legal expert Remco van Rhee found the…

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

The LUCDH foster the development of new digital research by awarding a number of Small Grants each year. COIn Grants support Infrastructure development. We congratulate our four successful awardees for 2026.

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

This book on Alba is edited by Maurits Ebben, Margriet Lacy-Bruijn and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier. Each of its fifteen chapters are dedicated to developing a new understanding of a sometimes misunderstood figure in European history.

Self-censorship violates principles of a free society but few people want to take the role of the martyr.

The Nietzsche-Wörterbuch (NWB) has evolved into a long-term, multi-volume work on a global scale with around 30 contributors from a range of disciplines located all over the world

The mission of Software and AI in Business (SA&B)connects the domains of science, business, and policy. Scientific research we focus on at Leiden in areas such as artificial intelligence promises to reshape our societies for the better. Translating science into positive societal impact however requires…

This project investigates the transposition of natural historical material, knowledge and vision, between different media (collection, scientific drawing, academic texts, the visual arts and/or literature) – a transmission that happens in the borderline between the traditional, emblematic worldview…

How did learned natural historical inquiries into the underwater world develop in eighteenth-century Europe?

The EU JudgeCo Platform provides valuable sources on cross-border insolvency court-to-court cooperation and communication in a EU context.

They were called 'annoying brats', the group of campaigning scientists who in 1978 founded what is now an internationally acclaimed ecological research institute. Their stories and those of the current staff of the Institute of Environmental Sciences are described in the book 'Forty years of Leiden…

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

Our project focuses on the analysis of decision-making processes in the European Union (EU) and explores how approaches and tools to understand decision-making found in both the Natural and the Social Sciences can be linked, knowledge between these traditions exchanged and synergies utilized. To explore…

In October 2014 a new publication on artistic research has been launched. The book is called Artistic Experimentation in Music. An Anthology, edited by Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, and published by Leuven University Press.

To address major societal challenges, research needs to go beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines. We believe this starts with education. By exposing students to people from different scientific fields, they learn to deal with diverse perspectives and can broaden their horizons. Professors…

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”.

The Prison Project investigates to what extent imprisonment has consequences for the relapse, health, career and intimate relations of the (ex-)prisoners.

What are the key technical, social, regulatory, economic, and ethical considerations for scaling up ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) approaches, and what integrated assessment frameworks and governance structures are needed to facilitate their implementation at scale?

In our lives we often have little attention or appreciation for plants, let alone the ones we commonly call weeds. This inattention for plants has been described as plant blindness. The Stoepplantjes project aspires to decrease plant blindness by changing the image of weeds and using citizen science.…

Leiden University is a unique international centre for the advanced study of languages, cultures, arts, and societies worldwide, in their historical contexts from prehistory to the present.

As Lila Abu Lughod pointed out in 1989, North Africa has been one of the geographical ‘zones of prestige’ for the development of canonical approaches and crucial theoretical debates regarding the comparative study of Islam.