The Centre for Modern Urban Studies (MUS) is a multidisciplinary research institute that looks at historic and current changes in large cities. Our research is focussed on socio-cultural, economical, legal or technological change and the ways all these elements interact.

The urban graveyard presents several studies in which the results of older archaeological and osteoarchaeological research are compared to more recent excavation data from several Dutch, Belgian and Danish cities and towns.

Cities are more relevant than ever. They plan an increasingly important role in the issues of this time: climate change, inequality, safety and health. Our Urban Studies programme gives you the opportunity to be a problem solver, teaching you how to develop real-life answers to today’s and tomorrow’s…

Study Information, Online Experience

This series of publications brings together new material on wellconsidered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies.

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

The KLM Urban Trail Series is a hugely popular series of running trails in the Netherlands that are a unique way to explore a city centre. This year Wijnhaven is opening its doors to the runners. Join in with the fourth edition of the KLM Urban Trail in The Hague on Sunday 7 July.

Central to this research is the Urban Future-project, which consists of a large archive of artworks made from 2002 until now.

Under construction

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

This thesis analyses the existence and the functioning of the urban labour market in the early Roman empire by looking at the crucial influence of social structures, such as the family and non-familial labour collectives.

Effectiveness and Side-effects.

Crime is men’s business, isn’t it? Women are responsible for 10 percent of crime in Europe. Yet, if we look at the Dutch Republic in the early modern period, we find that in the towns of Holland women played a much larger role in crime.

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period.

How do we explain the fact that certain areas had many large cities, while other areas were studded with large numbers of small towns and yet other areas had very few urban agglomerations of any kind?

What was the nature of the urban network in the Roman provinces of Germania Superior, Raetia and Noricum and how stood this in relation with economic and social developments?

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).

TruLife applies lessons from the study of long-term urban traditions, exemplified by pre-Columbian Maya tropical cities, to present-day sustainable urban design.

Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production

Read-Urban was a first project to investigate whether policy recommendations can be made with the aid of linked data collections and data science and to gain experience with the success factors for such a process.

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

PUMA aims at composing a geological map of the urban mine of Amsterdam for a selection of metals. Where are main deposits of copper, iron and aluminium located, when will they become available for secondary production, in what state and shape are they?

Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment.

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.

Professor Wim Willems of the Centre for Modern Urban Studies (MUS), together with Anne van Mourik, is researching the life of Ru Paré, the woman who saved 52 Jewish children during World War II.

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

Built Environment and Domestic Material Culture in the Medieval and Post-Medieval Cyclades, Greece (13th – 20th Centuries AD)

The principle aim of the project is to study the genesis and the quantitative properties of the Early Roman urban network of the Balkan and the Danube provinces.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections between a variety of artistic and cultural expressions and their role in society from 1800 onwards.

A dance form that is open to very diverse forms of movement. Characteristics of modern dance are working from the center of the body, breathing technique, contact with the floor and frequent use of turning and swinging movements.

The use of increasingly large and diverse datasets to guide urban climate action has implications for how, and by whom, local governments are held accountable.

My research project focuses on the development of a popular national agency in late nineteenth century Amsterdam and the question how ‘ordinary’ citizens imagined ‘the Netherlands’ through the experience and use of their urban surroundings.

This PhD research aims to trace the impact of the Arab conquest, both immediate and long-term, on the material and social organization of Central Asia from 651 to 821 through an “urban change” perspective in four cities: Merv, Paikent, Balkh and Samarkand.

The central aims of this project are to establish the shapes of the various urban hierarchies existing in the provinces of the Roman Empire and (especially) to use the quantitative properties of these hierarchies to shed new light on levels of economic integration.

Science, Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML)

In the South African context, certain iconic images have been a dominant source for public understandings of historical events. The emphasis given these images tends to overshadow the historical value of other more personal photographic sources – like studio or amateur photography. This project looks…

During the master’s programme in Modern Dutch Literature at Leiden University you will learn to scientifically analyse literary texts, as well as other Dutch cultural texts, such as those found in hiphop songs and diaries.

The research profile ‘Asian Modernities and Traditions’ (AMT) aims to raise the strength and visibility of research, teaching and dissemination on Asian studies at Leiden University.

This research network aims to promote cross-regional collaboration in the field of cultural history in early modern Asia at the intersections of visual, material, textual and aural culture.

The master's programme in Modern European Philosophy at Leiden University focuses on the philosophical reflection on human nature and culture, both from a systematic and a historical perspective.

The programme for the Modern Languages specialisation is a one-year programme within the masters's degree in Linguistics at Leiden University. In the course of the programme you will be able to focus on one of five language themes, or a combination thereof: Chinese Linguistics, English Linguistics,…

The central aim is to systematically study differences in crime patterns and social control between migrants and non-migrants in early modern Frankfurt am Main.

This project focuses on the study of Neanderthal and early modern human behavior, primarily on the basis of stone tools, fauna and spatial patterns

The Gravettian technocomplex dates to the period of 30,000 to 20,000 bp and is spread across Europe. This research theme explores the impact of the climatic and environmental changes during the pleniglacial on the Gravettian of northwestern and central Europe.