Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR) studies religion as human activity, in all its diversity.

Director: Dr. Fred Leemhuis

A comparative study of colonialism and rural settlement in first millennium BC west central Sardinia

On Thursday 7 November 2024 Vaudine England successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we address the limits and potential of montage.

This book traces the emergence of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) from 1955 to 1963 amid the broader reshaping of the institutional architecture of post-war Europe. It considers the ill-fated Free Trade Area (FTA) proposal, the subsequent creation of EFTA, and the resulting division of Western…

Simon Willmetts provides evidence for systematic policy of direct collussion between the TIme Inc. media empire and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

This edited collection brings together canonical texts on intermedia and expanded cinema in 1960s Japan, most of which translated into English for the first time, in hope to introduce the local critical discourse on this subject to international readership.

The Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network (LUMAN) brings medical anthropologists together with the aim of fostering interfaculty collaborations and creating common ground for working interdisciplinary on health-related themes in Leiden and beyond.

Promotor: A. Achúcarro Co-promotor: A. Boyarsky

To what extent have the Dutch and British militaries learned from their counterinsurgency operations in southern Afghanistan between 2006 and 2020?

Shining a light on the nefarious netherworlds of espionage, this is the first book to concentrate on the actual techniques and technologies used by early modern spies —from ciphers to counterfeiting, invisible inks to assassination

Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli (Eds.) This book posits that democracy promotion played a key role in the Reagan administration’s Cold War foreign policy.

Memory and Identity is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly…

The Rise and Decline of an Iberian Bourgeoisie is one of the first long-term studies in English of an Iberian town during the late medieval crisis. Focusing on the Catalonian city of Manresa, Jeff Fynn-Paul expertly integrates Iberian historiography with European narratives to place the city's social,…

Illustrations of the challenges and rewards of doing and representing interdisciplinary research through the methodological developments of 50 experienced researchers.

The expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin to Tenerife, Mauritius, Australia, Timor and South Africa in 1800-1804 is fully researched in regard to ornithology.

Descriptive linguistics at LUCL covers documentation and descriptive analysis of lesser-studied languages as well as typological and historical comparison.

The authors explore the decision-making processes and debates surrounding EU member states' troop contributions to CSDP military deployments.

The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

Elizabeth Stuart is one the most misrepresented – and underestimated – figures of the seventeenth century. Daughter of James VI & I, she was married to Frederick V, Elector Palatine in 1613 – they were crowned King and Queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be deposed and exiled to the Dutch Republic in…

Special Issue in: Visual Anthropology, Volume 29, Issue 3, 2016

This special issue of Contemporary Levant critically explores, at a micro and macro level, the structural role and religious, cultural and political interactions of the Greek-Orthodox, Melkite and Syriac communities in late Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine.

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

A new vision on the Revolt of the Low Countries through the eyes of Spanish commanders

Lecture, Sign Languages & Deaf People

This research combines archaeological, archaeometric and ethnohistorical research to study the organisation of settlement space and residence rules among the Taino Indians during the Late Ceramic Age (AD 1000-1492).

The Computer Systems, Imagery & media (CSI) research programme performs research on methods and techniques for the design, implementation and application of advanced computer systems, in particular parallel, distributed and embedded computer systems.

The Excellence of the Arabs is a spirited defense of Arab identity—its merits, values, and origins—at a time of political unrest and fragmentation, written by one of the most important scholars of the early Abbasid era.

Kuba funerary art from the Congo River Basin

In this article, Lydie Cabane, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, discusses the emergence and diffusion of ‘global health’ as a concept. In addition to bringing a fresh perspective on the origins of global health, the paper contributes to the globalization debates by…

Promotor: Prof.dr. A.G.G.M. Tielens, Co-Promotor: J.B.R. Oonk

General information

From Apartheid in South-Africa to 9/11 in the United States: there is not a single culture that is not shaped by the memory of war or conflict. The minor Cultural Memory of War and Conflict focuses on how such memory cultures influence and shape societies today.

The Leiden Lectures in Media | Art | Politics (MAP) is a series of talks organized by Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman. Speakers from various academic backgrounds and in different stages of their careers reflect on diverging ways in which technological and social changes challenge and transform…

My NVICairo Experience - Marie Costers (MA student, University of Antwerp, NVIC student Spring 2025)

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…

Increasingly, primary sources from the period before the emergence of digital media are being digitized. These “digital surrogates” have facilitated the work of (historical) researchers; instead of having to visit several archives, libraries and other places, the (primary) sources appear in front of…

Data management is crucial for the success of research projects.

Central to the research of several cluster members are the social function and contexts of the production and consumption of medieval and early modern art, literature and media:

The Historic Port Town of Sandy Point and its Anchorage

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers of European descent.

On 2 Juni 2021, Maarten Manse defended his thesis 'Promise, Pretence and Pragmatism: Governance and Taxation in Colonial Indonesia, 1870-1940'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. R. Arendsen.