Rembrandt experts have been puzzling over this painting from 1626 for years. The work may have been commissioned by someone from University circles and may depict a judgment. It can be seen at Gravensteen, a building that served as a prison between 1463 and 1955. This historical building later became…

Cultural Anthropologist Erik de Maaker published, together with Monica Janoswki (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia in Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS).

How do religious narratives persuade their readers to believe their message? And how can it be that some readers even come to treat fantasy and science fiction as authoritative religious texts? These are the core questions treated in Markus Davidsen’s new book Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance…

Religions involve belief in the unbelievable: in evil spirits causing disease, in souls surviving death, and in gods punishing wrongdoers and blessing the just. Cognitive studies suggest that humans are predisposed to speculate about fate and divine agency, but support from so-called ‘plausibility structures’…

Rembrandt painted the portraits of more Leiden alumni than we can show in the route. Discover who else posed for Rembrandt.

This study presents the findings of a laboratory-based experiment testing hypothesised processes implicated in the prevention of violent radicalisation through counter-narratives. The central aims of the study were to contribute to counter-narrative theory, whilst highlighting the value of experimental…

Conference

In this sub-project a selected number of narrative texts will be examined written in the Eurasian realm in the period 1300-1800, focusing on representations of kingship and royal authority.

The abundance of images in our everyday lives-and the speed at which they are consumed-seems to have left us unable to critique them. To rectify this situation, artists such as Daniel Richter, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Artur Zmijewski have demonstrated that painting is brilliantly equipped to produce…

Subproject of

In this paper for Defence Strategic Communications, Alastair Reed and Jennifer Dowling seek to show the importance of historical narratives to propaganda by identifying and exploring five ways in which such narratives are exploited to reinforce the extremists' 'competitive system of meaning'.

In this article, Samuels elaborates the concept of narrative navigation to analyze the subjective and intersubjective ways in which people struggle through experiences of illness by constructing multiple, ambiguous and non-linear narratives that may continuously change, as they reposition themselves…

This PhD project analyses the politics and aesthetics of depictions of torture in American and European ‘war on terror’ films.

This project explored the role of material culture, in casu painted plaster and its technologies, in expressing dynamic social identities and in forging complex interwoven human relationships in the context of the Middle to Late Bronze Age of the Aegean and East Mediterranean.

This dissertation gives an ethnographic account of Kurdish dengbêj narrative from a theorethical perspective.

This article discusses local expressions of crisis in Beed district, central Maharashtra. Both in public and academic discourse crisis has become the term of choice for the many structural deficiencies which make agriculture an increasingly precarious livelihood in India. While most voices subscribe…

Yearbook of Women's History.

Postcolonial Displacements explores the multiple ways in which migration in South Asia contributes to the imagining, questioning, subverting and reframing of territories, nations and communities. The project focuses on the contested fringes of the politically divided South Asian subcontinent, across…

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.

Wenxin Wang defended her thesis on 26 October 2016

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published Annemarie Samuels' article on the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It's a detailed ethnographic account of the experiences of three Indonesian survivors.

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies.

In this article, Samuels focuses on the active fostering of subjunctivity in processes of narrative worldmaking. Drawing extensively from the narrative of an HIV‐positive woman in Indonesia, she shows that by subjunctively leaving open multiple narrative trajectories and future possibilities, individuals…

Muge Özoglu defended her dissertation on 5 December 2018

Channi Li defended her thesis on 15 October 2019.

Ms. Monica Klasing Chen defended her thesis on 16 December 2020

Conference

This project investigates memorisation strategies that were employed in the fields of painting and calligraphy in imperial China, with a focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Spirited narratives of purpose and progress: church-society engagement alongside the (Company-) state

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused immense destruction and over 170,000 deaths in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The disaster spurred large-scale social and political changes in Aceh, including the intensified implementation of shari‘a law and an end to the long separatist conflict. After the Tsunami…

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567-1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions.

On the 26th of May Pao-Yi Yang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This thesis describes the development and validation of new high-contrast imaging techniques, with the ultimate goal of enabling the next generation of instruments for ELT-class telescopes to directly image Earth-like extra-solar planets orbiting around nearby stars.

This book considers the porous relationship between legality and illegality in Brazil, a country that presages political and societal changes in hitherto unprecedented dimensions.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Chinese export paintings have a much greater cultural-historical and artistic value than was previously thought in the Netherlands, according to external PhD candidate Rosalien van der Poel. She advocates making these works accessible to the general public. PhD defence 30 November.

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

How are the narrative concerns of Nigerian female writers constructed in relation to the structure to their society?

Leiden Professor of Maths Frans van Schooten Jnr. (1615-1660) and his wife Margrieta were painted by Rembrandt. This is the claim made by mathematician and art historian Johan Zwakenberg in his recently published article in the 2018 Leiden Yearbook. Leiden art historians are not completely convinced…

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

Fish climbing trees, storks taking care of their parents… Premodern textual and visual culture presents us with a fabulous bestiary that reveals ingenious and rich reflections on the animal kingdom.

Religions involve belief in the unbelievable: in evil spirits causing disease, in souls surviving death, and in gods punishing wrongdoers and blessing the just. Cognitive studies suggest that humans are predisposed to speculate about fate and divine agency, but support from so-called ‘plausibility structures’…

In the research for her upcoming book, Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts, author and academic Nadine Akkerman stumbled upon a little-known portrait of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia and grandmother of King George I, which she believes would have been considered treasonous at the time it was pain…

The seventh Leiden wall formula has been finished. Over the last few weeks, mural artists Ben Walenkamp and Jan Willem Bruins have painted Christiaan Huygens' pendulum formula on 'De Brandmeester' an old drill and hose tower in de Plaatsteeg, just behind the Breestraat in Leiden.

This study presents a re-evaluation of Malay adventure stories.

Practicum Artium (PA) is a programme specially developed for students of Leiden University with a talent for visual arts and an interest in artistic research. Art and research feed on one another and are intertwined in many ways. In Practicum Artium, you will explore artistic practices and methods,…