Research conducted in this group aims at furthering our understanding of how communities and individuals deal with social change, conflict and trauma through remembrance and commemoration as well as forgetting in the arts.

This research project, that started in September 2008, aims to explore how personal and public memories of the Dutch Revolt in the seventeenth century evolved and interacted to create new political and cultural identities for the societies that eventually were to become the kingdoms of the Netherlands…

The complexities of modernization in Brazil and Graciliano Ramos significance for our understanding of Brazil today.

What issues arise in the changing landscape of privacy, identity and data protection?

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone.

How and to what extent the historic house (re-)constructs identity through image-making in China.

People in Asia increasingly feel the need for a strong identity. This is the consequence of developments such as globalisation and the realisation that Asian countries such as China and India are becoming new world powers. Professor Hilde De Weerdt studies how political ideas and national identity spread…

The aim of the Indonesian-Dutch Literature Collective (which is allied to the Society of Dutch Literature (MNL)) is to support research into the literature of and about the Dutch Indies, from the era of the Dutch East India Company to the present. Starting in 1986, the collective has published its own…

This research hopes to contribute to social awareness of the consequences of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples, to the deconstruction of still existing colonial and discriminatory notions and to a better appreciation of Indigenous art and thought.

In my research I am concerned with the possibility of a politics of sexuality without reverting to identitarian conceptions of sexuality. In a reading of the work of the American author James Purdy, I propose to move towards a politicizing of the concept of narrative identity as developed by the French…

On the 16th of September, Bert van Pinxteren successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Bert on this achievement!

This doctoral project, entitled Sinophone as Method: Reimaging Chinese Cinema in the Global Era, aims to explore the intricacies of knowledges and practices with regard to notions of China, Chinese, and Chineseness.

What holds people together and what makes them willing to fit within larger political structures? Our project examines this question in the practices of dynastic rulership in Eurasia ca. 1300-1800.

How are night spaces imagined, produced, experienced and narrated by migrant communities in Europe? This research project considers this question in eight European cities: Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cork, Galway, Lisbon, London, Rotterdam. Authorities have historically wrestled with the issue of night-time…

This study links up the concept of place with memory, with the idea of transience and the transition from life to death.

As an artist Clevis is fascinated by the phenomenon of place in relation to beginnings and final destinations.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

How has interreligious encounter in Ogbómòsó created multiple religious belongings and identities among individuals and groups?

This subproject examines how memories of flight and persecution shaped new social and religious identities in the Netherlands.

This volume, edited by Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen, discusses practices of memory in early modern Europe.

The Revolt in The Netherlands erupted in 1566 and tore apart the Low Countries. In Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566-1700 Jasper van der Steen explains how public memories of the Revolt in the Habsburg Netherlands in the South and the Dutch Republic in the North diverged and became the objects…

Representing Japanese Colonial 'Heritage' in Taiwan

This synthesis brings together strands developed in the four studies, sets out memories of the Revolt and presents the Low Countries as a case study.

The terms ‘social’ , ‘collective’ or ‘public’ memory, are often contrasted with ‘private’, ‘individual’ or ‘personal’ memory. All these terms derive from a fairly new and interdisciplinary scholarly field that is often referred to as ‘memory studies’, and that according to some critics has developed…

Majuka Tanabe defended her thesis on 17 June 2015

A study concerning the collective memory in the region of the Bene lo Ya/ Ene lo I'ya, Sierra Norte, Oaxaca.

This project aims to identify which aspects of exploring a novel environment produce beneficial effects on memory. The effects of novelty will be investigated across the lifespan, including children, adolescents and older adults.

Before 1936, musical practices in Palestine relied heavily on colloquial poetry, especially in rural communities, which constituted most of the population. In this dissertation, Issa Boulos has examined historical records that revealed many differences and similarities between Palestinian communities…

This project asks how individuals and society dealt with personal memories of the Dutch Revolt: narrating, writing, explaining, understanding, and coming to terms with what happened by first and following generations.

On 1 September 2022 Afke van Ewijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Recent concerns about cultural identity emphasise the ongoing political and social importance of the question of how, and with whom, people identify. Changing and conflicting identities were highly relevant for pre-modern Europe. Paradoxically, the more powerful states became, the more their rulers…

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence…

How does the religious identity of islamic primary schools in the Netherlands relate to the social demands?

An account of a cognitive approach to historically informed staging.

This dissertation studies the construction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a cultural icon in American memory, particularly by FDR himself.

What is the role of memory in contemporary music?

Grace Leksana defended her thesis on 26 May 2020.

The research group Politics, Culture and National Identities 1789-present investigates a wide range of national political cultures in Europe and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of only analyzing high politics (the acts of governments and political parties), the research group focuses…

To what extent and how do identity processes influence health behavior?

A new paper written by Jolien van Breen, Soledad de Lemus, Russell Spears & Toon Kuppens in the British Journal of Social Pscychology examines the impact of the 2008-2012 financial crisis on national identity in Spain.

Honorata Mazepus and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz are assistant professors at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs. Mazepus and Kantorowicz are one of the authors of this article in Nature on the role of national identity on public health support during global pandemics.

This study investigates and analyses didactical approaches in theory and practice of both scholars and expert teachers in Religious Education/Life World Orientation (for secondary level) in their role as Identity Agents in order to discover and develop didactical key components contributing to religious…

Mr. Sujadi defended his thesis on 29 June 2017

Between 1798 and 1813 successive regimes attempted to enforce a fundamental geographical and administrative redivision of the Netherlands. The provinces that had been sovereign states within the Republic of the United Netherlands for over two centuries were dissolved and replaced by ‘departments’, subordinate…

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

Before the modern nation-state became a stable, widespread phenomenon throughout northern Europe, multilingualism-the use of multiple languages in one geographical area-was common throughout the region.

This research cluster is a part of the Institute of Political Science’s research programme ‘Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviour’. Its members study phenomena such as migration, immigration, citizenship, integration, ethnic parties, minority and caste-based politics, borders and migration,…

Providing a valuable overview of regionalism throughout the entire continent, Regionalism in Modern Europe combines both geographical and thematic approaches to examine the origins and development of regional movements and identities in Europe from 1890 to the present.

This subproject offers a political and transnational perspective on the development and uses of public memories of the Revolt in the seventeenth century.

This project examines changes in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century representations of the legendary twelfth-century general Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189) and how they reflect not only developments in themes of representation, but also changes in the focus of early modern and modern Japan’s…