An international congress, lectures and a new book series and magazine. It’s a hot topic at the moment that attracts broad public interest. Researchers, from historians to legal experts, are bringing together their expertise in the Leiden Slavery Studies Association.

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary

On 1 July – Keti Koti, in the year ahead, our university community will be able to reflect extensively on the history of slavery by engaging in research, education and many other activities.

In this book, a new generation of scholars offers fresh perspectives on the history of the Dutch slave trade. Traditionally, Dutch research has focused on business practices, often overlooking the enslaved and the complexities of illegal trade and violence.

What is the significance of the history of slavery for our present-day society? A special exhibition in the inner courtyard of the Academy Building features eleven insightful portraits of students and staff, and their answer to this question. The aim of the exhibition’s initiators is to make the subject…

Many traces of the city's slavery history can be found in Leiden but the public isn't always aware of them. The initiators of 'Mapping Slavery in Leiden' want to change this with guided tours and street markers. Representatives of the University and other Leiden institutions will be giving the first…

With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much-needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of…

Using enslaved people as servants, becoming an administrator in the Dutch West India Company or making uniforms for the colonial army. Many people from Leiden played a role in colonialism and slavery. Historians are conducting preliminary research and finding striking examples.

Since 2014 church organ player Paul Houdijk has been working on his PhD project on the musical and aesthetic developments of the Dutch 19th-century church organ builder Michael Maarschalkerweerd.

On 2 December, the Municipality of Leiden will apologise for the role previous administrations played in colonialism and slavery. A further study will be carried out.

This book offers a historical and historiographical analysis of the Spanish asiento de negros, a contract between the Spanish Monarchy and private parties to introduce specific number of enslaved Africans to Spanish America.

In a speech on Keti Koti the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, apologised on behalf of the royal family for the Netherlands’ historical role in slavery. What is the significance of this?

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

Research into our history of colonialism and slavery, heart-to-heart conversations at a Keti Koti table, exhibitions, lectures and podcasts that establish the link between present and past. Staff and students participated in the national Slavery Memorial Year in many different ways. What have we learned…

We welcome Paul Sharp as The Hague Journal of Diplomacy's first Honorary Editor.

Paul Kozowyk has received one of the Archon PhD positions with his research proposal Sticking around: identification, performance and preservation of Palaeolithic adhesives.

This project will establish how and why Dutch entrepreneurs participated in exploiting the English, French and Iberian empires.

The University of Bonn, Germany, is happy to announce the opening of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS).

The goal of our research is to analyze Natorp’s redefinition of the distinction between intuitions and concepts in relation to his conception of the method of philosophy. We will exhibit the connection between the way in which Natorp redefines the Kantian dichotomy and his conception of the method of…

Timo Slootweg, associate professor at he department Philosophy of Law, published a chapter about Paul Scholten in

As a practice in which human beings were held captive for an indefinite period of time, coerced into extremely dependent and exploitative power relationships, denied rights (including rights over their labor, lives, and bodies), often vulnerable to forced relocation by various means, and forced to labor…

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…

Where did the new generation of antislavery activists get their inspiration to organize in large-scale pressure groups?

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

Due to the almost complete disappearance of the archive of the Old Dutch West India Company (WIC, 1621-1674) not much is known about the ships and crews of this company. In this project we start the reconstruction of this basic information making use of new digital humanities techniques to extract this…

Professor Paul Keβler, prefect of the Leiden Hortus botanicus, holds the special chair Botanical gardens and botany of South-East Asia since 1 February 2017.

Herman Paul has received a €140,000 grant from the Thorbecke Fund (KNAW) for a project entitled “The Demands of Our Time: Epochal Thinking from 1800 to the Present.”

Investigating epistemic and ethical practices in medical experimentation on humans in the colonial period in Southeast Asia.

Paul Adriaanse, together with eight other candidates, has been nominated in the administration law category for the title ‘Magna Charta Lawyer of the year’. The public will vote to decide the winner

The following dissertation reconstructs Paul Natorp's philosophical psychology. It argues that psychology's main object is the lived experience of concrete subjects, understood as a transcendental structure of logical-reflexive conditions for the recognition, appropriation, and evaluation of objective…

The environment also benefits when people follow national nutritional guidelines, Paul Behrens demonstrated in research published in PNAS. The publication attracted media attention both at home and internationally.

This project involves research into the oeuvre of the Sundanese sculptor Iko, who has worked for the Catholic mission in Java and has carved sculptures for a chapel and church in Ganjuran. The images were designed by the Catholic layman Jos Schmutzer and are characterized by a fusion in style and symbolism…

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

Environmental researcher Paul Behrens generated both international as national media attention with his recent publication in Nature Energy. The media included Science Daily, Quartz and the Dutch financial newspaper Financieel Dagblad. In his publication, Behrens warns for possible power disruptions…

A new plant species was named after Paul Kessler, prefect of the Leiden Hortus botanicus. Kessler discovered the small tree, which is related to the kiwifruit, himself.

Here is an interview of Susanna Lindberg made in 2023 by Bart Buseyne and Paul Cruysberghs and published in 2025 in La Deleuziana: « Il va falloir inventer » – Susanna Lindberg en conversation

On 16 November, Scottish artist and post-doctoral scholar at ACPA, Janice McNab was a visiting artist at the Paul Branch Visiting Artist Lecture Series of CalArts in California.

At the initiative and expense of His Majesty King Willem‑Alexander, Leiden University will conduct a study into the role of the House of Orange‑Nassau in Dutch colonial history. The project will run from 2023 to 2026.

Peter Paul van Benthem is not only head of the ENT department at the LUMC but also chair of the Federation of Medical Specialists. ‘The value is in the mix.’