How did British scholars and scientists in the period of discipline formation envision, experience and resist scholarly temptations?

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

The Colonial and Global History (research) programme at Leiden University offers the most in-depth and comprehensive programme of European expansion and globalisation currently available in Europe.

How was the Scholarly Self cultivated in professorial families of the humanities, in German-speaking Europe between 1860 and 1930?

Ideology and Christianity in Japan shows the major role played by Christian-related discourse in the formation of early-modern and modern Japanese political ideology.

Welcome to the Leiden University Centre for Islamic Thought and History. The initiatives and projects undertaken here are under the auspices of the Leiden University Centre for Intercultural Philosophy. As a centre, we aim to promote the study of Arabic and Islamic thought and history, in all its different…

Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500 provides a comprehensive survey of this complex and varied formative period of European history, covering themes as diverse as barbarian migrations, the impact of Christianisation, the formation of nations and states, the emergence of an expansionist commercial…

The Europaeum programme: European History and Civilisation is a unique one-year master’s programme offered by Leiden University, Université Paris I – Panthéon/Sorbonne and the University of Oxford.

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) was the first world empire in history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya - and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. This territorial sweep is both a source of fascination…

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the city of Batavia was supplied with produce by its hinterland, known as the Ommelanden. Bondan Kanumoyoso studied the history of the various ethnic groups that populated this area and in doing so has shed light on the structure of modern-day Indonesian society.…

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…

So-called

By delivering his inaugural lecture titled ‘Where Science Meets Business,’ Simcha Jong accepted his appointment as Leiden’s first Professor of Science Based Business. In his lecture in the Large Auditorium of the Academy Building, Simcha argued that broad universities with a focus on fundamental research,…

Antibiotics are a class of medicine most people take for granted. But pathogenic bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to our antibiotics, and this poses a great challenge for future treatments. There is thus a great societal need to identify new molecules that can address new targets and be…

The Dutch empire fulfilled the goals, interests and necessities of the central state, of the local elites and of the common man. This thematic issue of Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis goes beyond traditional views of the Empire as a ‘trading enterprise’, and argues that the Dutch empire, like all other…

PhD Programme of the Institute for History

A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism, and Politics in Mexico since 1968

“Winner CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award 2016” A Cultural History

Making extensive use of primary source materials this study contributes to existing scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century grammars and grammarians by providing an in-depth study of Ash’s Grammatical Institutes and its influence on other popular grammars for children.

Debates on political legitimacy in Dutch parliament in the 1880s, 1930s, and 1960s

Last year, LUCSoR welcomed two new Ph.D. students from Iran: Kiyan Foroutan from Ahvaz and Amir Ardalan Emami from Tehran. Kiyan works on a project on the role of the family in medieval and early modern Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (15th-18th centuries). Ardalan works on a much earlier period, the…

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

How did the medieval manuscript develop as a physical object during the Twelfth Century Renaissance and what do these changes tell us about the intellectual culture of the period?

How to related figures of savages to conceptions of history?

A Spanish translation of Herman Paul’s 'Key Issues in Historical Theory' has appeared under the title 'La llamada del pasado: claves de la teoría de la historia'.

Humanities, Institute for History

Why does the past elicit this intense activity in the present? What does the past mean for the present, and what does it do to it? A WAR OF WORDS will engage this complex of Chinese claims to Manchu-Korean ancient history, South Korean reactions, public discourse and cultural expression in both states,…

Natural history collections provide invaluable sources for researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds, aspiring to study the geographical distribution of flora and fauna across the globe as well as other evolutionary processes.

This project aims to study the Aesopian fable from 1500 to the present day in its complex relationship between text, illustration and education, adopting a broad, transnational perspective.

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…

The changing status of anatomical collections from the early modern period to date.