The 2011 disasters precipitated widespread concern among heritage scholars about the fate of Tohoku’s cultural properties, tangible and intangible. Damage to not only buildings and landscapes but also ‘formless’ heritage, some worried, could weaken social infrastructure and thus slow or undermine re…

Around the sixth and seventh centuries, South and Southeast Asia saw a great religious change: Saivism largely took over from Vaisnavism. We’re going to look at the way in which Saivism, the religion of the god Siva, presented itself with respect to Vaisnavism. In particular we’ll investigate the role…

The prehistory of communication metaphors

For many centuries, news about catastrophic events has been disseminated via media such as pamphlets, chronicles, poems, and prints. This conference welcomes contributions that engage with the cultural dimensions of disasters and reflect on representations of catastrophes in different media.

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…

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.

As part of Nexus 1492 Subproject 4: A Future for Diverse Caribbean Heritages, which seeks to shed light on how local communities interpret and engage with heritage in the present day, this doctoral study aims to gain insight into how indigenous heritage is represented in the school curriculum for social…

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world.

How do speakers adapt to multilingual contexts?

Exploring the language of the lower classes in the nineteenth century

Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering.

This project will study the cultural meaning of the mythological figure of Orestes within the ancient Greek imagination, as it emerges from various literary sources from the archaic and classical periods.

The president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has personally invited Jan Slikkeveer, professor of Ethnobotanical Knowledge Systems in Developing Countries, to give a lecture during the World Culture Forum. The Forum will be hosted in Indonesia from 24 to 27 November.

Mindfulness is all the rage. But what is mindfulness and is this popular form of medication completely harmless? Come to the workshop on 19 September by Chris Goto-Jones, Professor of Philosophy and mindfulness therapist, and find out for yourself.

Leiden University celebrated the annual prize ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC) on 8 November with lectures by leading scientists in a festively decorated Pieterskerk.

Call for Papers: Imperial Artefacts. History, Law, and the Looting of Cultural Property

China is a one-party regime, yet elections are held for the local congresses. PhD candidate Wang Zhongyuan investigated how the Communist Party uses this democratic instrument to strengthen the authoritarian regime. PhD defence 31 January.

EUROTYPES is a research project developed by political scientist Adina Akbik, for which she recently received a European Research Council Starting Grant. Her aim is to examine the impact of cultural stereotypes in European multi-level policy enforcement. One of EUROTYPES' innovations lies in its focus.…

Society has an impact on what is viewed as heritage. Susanna de Beer investigated how heritage can be made enduring by making use of it in the present. Lars de Kruijf, student of Dutch and Journalism New Media, spoke with Susanna de Beer.

The expansion of European powers overseas brought Europeans into contact and conflict with the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Historians of colonialism and post-colonial scholars have long argued that this encounter was crucial for the formation of European identity, which originated…

The Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) alliance signed a collaboration agreement with the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology on 23 September.

Are there cross-cultural principles of law?

This 3-year EU Erasmus+ co-funded project focuses on the strengthening and improvement of teaching qualitative research methods across a range of disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities in Bhutan.

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a major multidisciplinary research project which aims to re-vision the history of Asia in one of its most significant periods. The project is based at the British Museum, British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and…

The past decade, against the backdrop of a fragmented political landscape, has witnessed the greatest changes to the Netherlands since the aftermath of the Second World War. The labour market, the housing market, the energy market, the bank system, the pension system, the healthcare system, to name…

This book addresses the definition of history and how people are influenced by it.

Women Writing Mexico (WWM) is a network of women and men concerned with the human rights crisis in Mexico and more specifically, with the impact of structural forms of poverty, everyday violence, and discrimination based on gender, race, social class, and ethnicity, that particularly have an impact…

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

Leiden-Yale collaboration uncovers a tale of samurai same-sex love in a library manuscript.

Presenting case studies by both senior and emerging scholars, it makes mandatory reading for anyone interested in the challenges of governance, citizenship and development faced by the people of India’s North East.

This study employs a comparative perspective to identify generic and specific qualities of petitions and petitioning. It charts the chronological development of petitioning practices over centuries. The interdisciplinary approaches provide range of conceptual and methodological expertise for reade…

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

The Leiden Lectures in Media | Art | Politics (MAP) is a series of talks organized by Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman. Speakers from various academic backgrounds and in different stages of their careers reflect on diverging ways in which technological and social changes challenge and transform…

Prof. dr. Marcel Cobussen will take part in a research network project in London.

In October, Sophie Starrenburg was elected as a member of the Coordinating Committee of the ESIL Interest Group on the International Law of Culture. She will work alongside Giovanni Carlo Bruno (Italian National Research Council), Andrzej Jakubowski (Polish Academy of Studies), and Lucas Lixinski (University…

Essays in Honour of Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse

The languages of the Mbam-et-Inoubou District of the Centre Region of Cameroon have a unique position in Bantu linguistics. Being in between

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

Investigation of 1.) The whereabouts of the epistemological dissonances in art criticisms on Post-war contemporary art from Japan between two different language realms, in this case in English and Japanese; and 2.) What the dissonances disclose, disturb, and contribute in the process of the establishment…