The research master in History at Leiden University offers five specialisations in which you will focus on historical processes, historical research, historiography and methodology.

“Temminck’s Order” is the scientific biography of Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778–1850), a Dutch naturalist and the first director of ’s Rijks Museum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden.

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

LIAS Global History Workshop brings together faculty and graduate students in LIAS and other Institutes who are interested in writing critical histories grounded in empirical research and theory, irrespective of historiographical approach, geographical focus, or time period.

‘The Survival of Pliny in Padua. The Botanical Renaissance and the Transformation of Classical Scholarship’ in: Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, ed. by K.A.E. Enenkel. Intersections 29 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, forthcoming autumn 2013), pp. 327-62.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

The NWO just announced the results of the Vrije Competitie proposals. Paul Smith, professor at the French department is, as a member of LUCAS, one of three scholars within the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University who has been awarded this grant.

The motto of the Institute for History is: ‘Global questions, local sources.’ Its researchers use local sources to find answers to major historical questions. Without historical analysis, it is impossible to understand and explain the issues in society today. Leiden itself has a rich history, with big…

This project tries to explain the persistence of this cultural repertoire by zooming in on (1) interaction between idioms (cultural repertoires) available to scholars at certain points in time, (2) mechanisms that help transmit repertoires across time and place, and (3) rhetorical purposes for which…

Inspired by a critical reconsideration of current monolithic approaches to the study of Greek religion, this book argues that ancient Greeks displayed a disquieting capacity to validate two (or more) dissonant, if not contradictory, representations of the divine world in a complementary rather than…

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

What are key regulators of plant ageing that can reverse ageing in plants (rejuvenation), and how can we use this knowledge to improve crop plants?

In what way is constructivist logic able to account for both the role of the judging agent in inference and the universal claims of logical validity?

The second authors' conference of the General Labour History of Africa (GLHA) project will be held from 10 to 12 December 2015 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

This project examines the meaning of this historical place, and the way it has been used by the political institutions that have had their seat there.

This book explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas.

This volume edited by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen aims to quantify and qualify cross-cultural global migrations and was published in the series 'Studies in Global Migration History'.

The Executive Board has appointed Herman Paul (Institute for History) as Professor of History of the Humanities. He will take up the role from 1 January 2019.

A group of confidants including a former student of Meijers managed to avert his deportation to a death camp. In her lecture on 27 November, Cleveringa Professor Marjan Schwegman revealed the history of the persecution of the Jewish Professor Eduard Meijers.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

This Collaborative Research Group acts primarily as a platform for discussion of historical issues related to the African continent, its place in the world and in African Studies.

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…

Diplomatic History has never been a static discipline. The traditional, orthodox approach of piecing together the decision-making processes of policy-makers remains central, with its goal of reconstructing the reality of statecraft the defining characteristic. This approach - what A.J.P. Taylor referred…

When we think of the history of Dutch slavery, the areas that spring to mind are primarily the Antilles and Suriname. However, until the end of the eighteenth century there were also Dutch plantation colonies in neighbouring Guyana. Bram Hoonhout’s book ‘Borderless Empire’ describes this forgotten h…

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

Humanities, Institute for History

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