Promotor: Prof.dr. J.N. Kok, Co-Promotor: W.A. Kosters

This monograph by dr. Kim Beerden compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome.

A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World offers in-depth coverage of the most important topics in the study of Greek and Roman urbanism. Bringing together contributions by an international panel of experts, this comprehensive resource addresses traditional topics in the study of ancient cities,…

Located in the small Kingdom of Commagene at the upper Euphrates, the late Hellenistic monument of Nemrud Daǧ (c. 50 BC) has been undeservedly neglected by scholars

What socio-cultural transformations did indigenous communities in the Lesser Antilles undergo from the late precolonial to the early colonial period in response to Amerindian­ European-African cultural encounters? How did Amerindian populations realign themselves in response to the colonisation…

On 24 January 2026, the Advanced MSc International Relations and Diplomacy (MIRD) hosted its Annual Reconnect & Gala, bringing together alumni from across the world, current students, and faculty. The event celebrated shared values, connection, and purpose, focusing on ‘The great shifts in international…

Promotor: Prof.dr. P. Stevenhagen & Prof.dr. K. Belabas (Univ. de Bordeaux)

This year’s EUSA biannual research conference, which took place in Miami in May 2017, saw a large delegation of the Europa Institute Leiden leaving its mark. In several panels, Prof. Luuk van Middelaar, Dr. Moritz Jesse (Associate Professor at the Europa Institute), Dr. Armin Cuyvers (Assistant Professor…

Promotor: S.J. Edixhoven, Co-promotor: R.S. de Jong

This research project from Leiden University looks at the opportunities and threats that flow from the existence of institutional and normative diversity in the area of fundamental rights for the effective protection of those rights in a pluralist world.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

Explore how skateboarding functions as a prefigurative learning tool in 'Skate/worlds.' This volume examines skateboarding's therapeutic potential, its role in queering and decolonizing education, and its impact on parenting and care work through perspectives from writers, educators, and activists.

We are living in an information era where the amount of image and video data increases exponentially.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

An algorithm is discussed to compute the exponential representation of principal units in a finite extension field F of the p-adic rationals.

This research profile area brings together descriptive, historical and theoretical linguistics, as well as psycho- and neurolinguistics.

Promotor: Prof.dr. I.A.G. Snellen, C.U. Keller

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members. Angelo Romano, Matthias Sutter, James Liu, Toshio Yamagishi & Daniel Balliet studied national parochialism across different nations and conclude in their publication in Nature Communications that it is a ubiquitous…

This PhD project investigates the forms, functions, meanings, and socio-cultural values embedded in Palenda, in order to understand how it reflects and shapes the worldview of the Muna people (Mieno Wuna) through metaphor.

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

Is our musicality unique? To find out, the Bird Singalong Project brings together singing parrots from all over the world. Do you have a parrot that sings or whistles along to songs and would you like to help us? Sing up now!

Material Crossovers

The World Politics Major at Leiden University College The Hague examines the big ideas and the powerful forces – political, military, economic, social and cultural – that shape the world at every level, from the global to the local and everything in between. Political conflict is a key driver of many…

Conference

The Executive Board of Leiden University has appointed Dr Alicia Schrikker as Professor of Dutch History in the World, effective 1 January 2026. The chair is based at the Institute of History (Faculty of Humanities).

Machine Learning is becoming a more and more substantial technology for industry.

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

1000 Years of World History in 100 Old Maps.

Optimally solving real-world expensive Black-Box Optimization (BBO) problems w.r.t. real-world constraints, such as wall-clock time and computational costs, is extremely difficult and tedious.

In Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, Emeritus Professor Mineke Schipper reflects on myths about ‘the end’.

In this opinion article published in World Development, the authors present five research and policy priorities. While it is clear that ‘pluriversal’ designs need to guide the way forward (Kothari et al 2019), defining a set of key pillars can provide direction and purpose across this pluriversality.…

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

Classical mathematical models treat space and time as a continuum, while it is sometimes more useful to regard it as granular. Hupkes is studying what this means for a number of important patterns that are often found in computer calculations and in nature.

Insect egg development in a warming world: the eco-evo-devo of embryonic developmental time: What is the genetic basis of developmental time?

The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the…

On Tuesday 10 September 2024 May Shaddel Basir successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Humans can see the world through the eyes of other humans and imagine what they know, want, and intend. This competence is known as Theory of Mind.

Promotor: R. Gill, Co-promotor: P. Massart

A portrait of the complex historical process of over 500 years of European colonialism in the New World.

This book examines the critical role of information and knowledge in early modern Europe's global pursuits, exploring challenges in trusting distant information, the development of doubt in intercultural encounters, and the impact of misinformation.

Are there general principles or values that should govern our actions as moral agents and/or as political subjects?