What did it mean to be enslaved in in the Indian Ocean world in the 18th and 19th centuries? Over the last decades, historians have mined French, British, Portuguese and Dutch records for quantitative data on the European slave trade. This project focuses on the experience of being a slave and seeks…

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

Maps play a crucial role in our view of the past, yet few historians are sufficiently skilled in cartography to genuinely integrate maps into their research. This project breaks down the long-standing barriers between history and cartography by inviting emerging scholars (ResMA) to reflect on maps as…

The artefacts that still remain from the traditional culture of the indigenous Yukon, Canada, are spread over dozens of museums throughout the world. Yukon Indian Ukjese van Kampen carried out research to bring this culture to light. This is the subject of his dissertation entitled ‘The history of Yukon…

When many people think of slavery, they think of the translatlantic trade that took place between Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.

Gerrie Lodder has published an article in the Dutch legal periodical Nederlands Juristenblad on the exploitation of labour migrants from the perspective of human rights.

This omnibus brings together some old and some recent works by Jos Gommans on the warhorse and its impact on medieval and early modern state-formation in South Asia.

This is the first reference work to describe the history of embroidery throughout Central Asia, the Iranian Plateau and the Indian Subcontinent from the medieval period through to the present. It offers an authoritative guide to all the major embroidery traditions of the region and a detailed examination…

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

Promotor: E. Gittenberger, Co-promotores: B.W. Hoeksema; L.P. van Ofwegen

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

The Ocean Cleanup (TOC) recently signed an agreement with the State of the Netherlands concerning the legal status of its activities, carried out on the high seas. The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic (LAPP) carried out research that may have contributed to the conclusion of this covenant.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

Even the Mohawk Indians were talking about Serv Wiemers’ thesis. This Law alumnus, who has been intrigued by the world of American Indians since he was a boy, recently wrote a book about that world.

Audible Absence: Searching for the Site in Sound Production

Lezing, Contemporary History and International Relations Research Seminar (CHIRRS)

On 11 May 2017, The Ocean Cleanup revealed a new design for its cleanup system. LAPP was there!

Seven bachelor students in Computer Science at Leiden University are participating in a research project on big data and event management. Their work should eventually result in a system that can be applied at the finish of the Volvo Ocean Race in The Hague in June next year.

Apart from his activities as coordinator of the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Rogier Schneemann is co-founder, guitarist and composer of the Dutch-Italian group Azure Hiptronics, originally formed in 2006.

On 27 November 2019, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) organized a symposium on the plastic pollution crisis.

Lezing, Studium Generale

Lezing

This project will lead to a critical edition and annotated translation of the Niśvāsamukha, the opening book of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā.

At LUCIS we offer a varied programme of scholarly meetings (conferences, workshops) which reflect our multidisciplinary and comparative view on Islam and Muslim societies in past and present.

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.

Congres/symposium

The largest galaxies in the Universe feed off cosmic oceans, which helps them grow. This is the presumption of an international team of scientist with two Leiden astronomers, based on observations of the ‘Spiderweb’ galaxy. The researchers published their evidence in Science on 2 December 2016.

In the depots of the Faculty of Archaeology, many artifacts, accumulated after decades of fieldwork across the world, are stored. A new project, the Leiden Inventory Depot (LID), aims to unlock this wealth of information to the outside world. Our Master’s students Sam Botan and Rishika Dhumal are currently…

Maritime History encompasses humankind’s relationships to the seas and oceans of the world.

‘There is often a strong emphasis on the differences with Asia when actually there are so many similarities on all sorts of levels. Parents in Asia deliberate just as much about which school they should send their child to,’ says Frank Pieke, Professor of Modern China Studies. The opening conference…

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?

Archaeologist Hayley Mickleburgh studies how bodies decompose. This helps with the reconstruction of changes in the burial rituals of Caribbean Indians.

The archaeology of Afro-Eurasian networks across land and sea (1st millennium CE)

Lezing

A study of Dutch Fort at Galle, Sri Lanka

Congres/symposium

Congres/symposium

In the book 'Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka' Nira Wickramasinghe, professor of Modern South Asian Studies, uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world. She was interviewed about the book in the New Books in South East Asian…

Carolijn Brouwer and ambitious are synonymous. That has got her a long way. She was the first woman to be part of the winning team of the Volvo Ocean Race, the toughest of sailing races. 'Would I take part again? Only for a bigger challenge - as skipper, for example.'

Lezing, Studium Generale