Research programme
Global History of Knowledge
Our team is committed to the study of knowledge in its broadest sense, encompassing both ideas and practices in all its historical variety. We look at what people regarded as knowledge, how they created, collected, circulated and used it, also why it mattered to them, and how all this was embedded in political, socio-economic, cultural and religious contexts.
- Contact
- Bart Verheijen
We are particularly interested in global exchanges and contestations of knowledge, which we study with empirical rigour on the basis of primary sources in their original language (in line with our institute’s motto, “global questions, local sources”). Many of us focus on moments of intensive cross-cultural entanglements (explorations and globalization) and asymmetrical power relations (empires and colonialism) which triggered new, often neglected global networks of ideological resistance (revolutions and peace movements) and religious revivalism (fundamentalism, theosophy).
In doing so, we are a diverse crowd, using approaches that vary from Cambridge-style intellectual history to postcolonial studies to more-than-human history. In everyday practice, this diversity is reflected in our teaching and supervision across a wide range of fields, including intellectual history, history of ideas, cultural history, history of science, technology, and medicine, history of esotericism and the occult, critical heritage studies, history of the humanities, historiography, and historical theory.
Related research
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Global History of Knowledge
- Colonialism Inside Out: Everyday Experience and Plural Practice in Dutch Institutions in Sri Lanka (c. 1700-1800)
- Covering the Ocean. Newspapers and Information Management in the Atlantic World, 1580-1820
- Paths through slavery: urban slave agency and empowerment in Suriname, 1700-1863
- Cosmopolis
- Photographic traditions in black popular modernities: towards a socio-historical analysis of the visual economy in and beyond South Africa
- Cosmopolis Advanced
- Dutch Shipping and the Environment, 1621-1939
- Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era
- Institutional memory in the making of colonial culture: history, experience and ideas in Dutch colonialism in Asia, 1700 – 1870.
- Cosmos Malabaricus
- Who did all the work? The hidden labour of colonial science
- Preliminary Research into the Colonial and Slavery History of the City of Leiden and Leiden University
- International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization, 1918-1970
- Epistemic actors. The role of Indonesians in the making of knowledge in the colonial era
- Connecting in times of duress: understanding communication and conflict in Middle Africa’s mobile margins
- Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History
- The scholarly self: character, habit, and virtue in the humanities, 1860-1930
- COMET. Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia
- Digital warfare in the Sahel: popular networks of war and Cultural Violence