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…

In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature…

How did the life course, with all its biological, social and cultural aspects, influence the lives, writings, and art of the inhabitants of early medieval England?

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In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

The contributions in this volume seek to highlight the atypical features of the Hanse, and place them in a wider context of common roots, influences and parallel developments.

Generations of Leiden students and academics have done archaeological research into the early medieval history of Oegstgeest. This makes this old settlement one of the best-documented sites from that era. In a new book, Leiden researchers take stock.

Built Environment and Domestic Material Culture in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Cyclades, Greece (13th – 20th Centuries AD)

This project investigates the rich linguistic history of the crucial language groups in East Africa and includes a search for words that indicate earlier lost languages. These outcomes, combined with recent archaeological and genetic research, will contribute to a new understanding of East Africa’s…

How is the instructional practice of teachers connected to the mastery of reading skills of students in kindergarten (group 2) to the third grade (group 5) of primary education in Curaçao?

Leiden University social scientists have shown that customised intervention pays off. A new fundamental research-based approach in children who are in danger of going off the rails has delivered spectacular results.

Conference, Workshop

This NWO-funded VICI project (2025-2030) led by Prof.dr. Petra M. Sijpesteijn examines the place-making processes in the early Islamic Empire.

This programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell.

On Wednesday 23 October 2024 Yixiu Jiang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In this 3-volume set of primary sources, Lionel Laborie and Ariel Hessayon bring together a wide range of vital sources for the study of prophecy in the early modern world. This meticulously edited collection includes rare material and fascinating manuscripts published in English for the first time.

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This study tests whether behavioural problems at a young age are related to early reading and mathematics development.

Anna Scott is a Canadian pianist-researcher interested in using the early twentieth century recordings of the Brahms circle of pianists to question persistent gaps between the loci of knowledge, ethics, and act in both modern mainstream and historically-informed performances of Brahms’s late piano w…

Migration and Mobility in the Early Roman Empire by Luuk de Ligt and Laurens E. Tacoma (Eds.)

Essays dedicated to Frans Wiggermann

Songbirds as vocal learners learn their songs and song preference from social tutors⁠. Tutor choice for both song and preference learning are important to characterize for understanding individual learning performance and cultural transmission of song⁠.

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

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…

This research project is an integral part of its mother-programme NEXUS1492 ERC Synergy Project directed by Prof. Corinne Hofman. Overarchingly, it aims at understanding and bridging from the archaeological perspective the late pre-colonial and early colonial history of the Southeastern Caribbean macroregion…

The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, wage war and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resista…

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567-1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions.

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…

In early medieval England, there was an interest in the history of the Roman Empire and kings adopted such imperial titles as 'imperator' or 'basileus'. How can we explain this interest and what functions did imperial ideas and the reception of the classical world serve in early medieval England?

An early farming community in Thessaly, Greece.

In this paper, Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga recast new light on the historical tattooing of the “Pintados,” or the the name by which the inhabitants of the Visayas Islands (in the central Philippines) were called by Spanish documenters in the sixteenth century. This is one of their…

Imami Shiʿism was a key part of the turbulent thesis and antithesis which formed Islam, and it remains greatly influential today. The aim of the ImBod project is to write the first comprehensive social history of the Imamate.

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence…

The article investigates the origins of Indo-European languages in Asia by 65 coupling ancient genomics to archaeology and linguistics.

My ERC Starting Grant, funded with €1.5 million for 5 years as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, is focused on building the early warning system WARN-D to reliably forecast depression in young adults before it occurs. Why depression, and why prediction?

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

Did early farmers deliberately use animal manure on their fields?

SEECR-CONGO aims to strengthen the doctoral education ecosystem in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to foster a new generation of highly skilled researchers who can contribute to academia and the wider labour market.

On Tuesday, September 16, 2025, Professor Elisheva Baumgarten (Hebrew University) delivered a Keynote Lecture at the Leiden Jewish Studies Network Conference “Care and the Jewish Experience".

How might viola and string quartet playing in the performer-centered, moment-to-moment and communicative style heard on early recordings be brought about today?

Leiden archaeologist José Joordens has been awarded a Veni grant to develop her research on the role of climate change in early hominin evolution.

Neanderthals and modern humans in Belgium, a bone story

When do fire making tools appear in prehistory, and how might the use of these tools manifest in the archaeological record?

Wil Roebroeks, Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology in Leiden, is to be awarded the ‘Academy Professors Prize’ of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Roebroeks has drastically changed academic thinking about the behaviour of early hominins and our knowledge of the earliest colonisation…