So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

Leiden University has a new Executive Board. Since 8 February 2021, Annetje Ottow has been the new President and Hester Bijl the new Rector Magnificus of the Board, while Martijn Ridderbos has continued in his role as Vice-Chairman.

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 14 May 2026 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm.

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

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…

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism.

Why are professors still warning their students against dogmatism, prejudice, pedantry, and other centuries-old vices? What explains the persistence of these scholarly vices across the ages?

ChatGPT, the text-generating chatbot, has recently become available for anyone to use. Is this artificial intelligence (AI) tool a threat to our teaching?

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

Volume I of The Cambridge History of Strategy offers a history of the practice of strategy from the beginning of recorded history, to the late eighteenth century, from all parts of the world.

This is a difficult time. Above all, for all those directly involved in this horrible case – unacceptable behaviour by a professor and his removal from the University – the case we went public about on 18 October and that has been reported in the media. This is painful and tough for the complainants…

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.

If we need funding for a project, equipment or research at the university, we automatically think of the Dutch Research Council or other grant providers. But more and more researchers are managing to connect with people who care about the university.

Several Dutch universities have said they do not want foreign student numbers to grow any more in some of their degree programmes. They are reaching maximum capacity. We are also alert to this in Leiden, but I see many positive aspects to the intake of international students.

We asked a lot of everyone last year. The Personnel Monitor showed that the workload was high in 2022 and Covid took its toll. I therefore think everyone deserves some downtime. Time away from the daily grind.

From William Shakespeare to Marilynne Robinson, A Literary History of Reconciliation is the first study to examine representations of interpersonal reconciliation in work of literature across a long-term period, from the early seventeenth century to the present day, focusing on how these representations…

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.

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

This project studies the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems to establish the character of past “natural” landscapes and enhance the management of current ones.

The second major collection of papers from the Bridging the Unbridgeable project.

On the 11th of October, Micheal Swanton succesfully defended his PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Micheal on this great result.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

Volume II of The Cambridge History of Strategy focuses on the practice of strategy from 1800 to the present day.

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…

Liu Puning defended his thesis on 25 April 2018.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Which genes are involved in woodiness and associated traits such as drought tolerance, flowering time, stem elongation, life span, and plant herbivory, and how do these gene regulatory pathways overlap?

Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past?

A defining fixture of our contemporary world, video games offer a rich spectrum of engagements with the past.

In a podcast episode of 'New Books in History' Claire Weeda talks about her book 'Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion'.

The Institute for History announces vacancies for three PhD positions on Rethinking Disability: the Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective and one PhD position to conduct research on the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

The rising energy prices cannot have escaped anyone’s notice. They have dominated the news in recent months. As a university, we too face a big challenge as the prices continue to rise. We will all have to do our bit in the coming months, also in view of the climate crisis that we want to help resol…