This chapter introduces interactive documentaries (also known as i-docs) in digital and audiovisual anthropology. Interactive documentaries allow an audience to actively engage with an interface in order to experience the content. For example, opening Miranda Dahlin’s Exiliados: Mexican Asylum in El…

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

PhD candidate Magda Pucci studied indigenous music in Brazil. She and her group Mawaca travelled through the Amazon and played with peoples there such as the Paiter Suruí, Kayapó, Ikolen-Gavião and the Huni-Kuin. PhD defence on 19 March.

More than eighty students of the Honours College track Science & Society completed their thematic courses. Instead of filling out an exam, they presented a documentary or blog series. These new forms of assessments offered a new perspective on topics like homelessness and the use of mobile phones.

Visual Ethnography graduate Ildikó Plájás received the Best documentary award in the student competition at the international Astra Film Festival in Romania.

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) covers two years and can be studied in four programmes, one of them is Egyptology. When you choose to study this programme, you will both be guided through the broadness of Egyptological sub-disciplines, as well as gradually led to develop your own specific…

This research combines archaeological, archaeometric and ethnohistorical research to study the organisation of settlement space and residence rules among the Taino Indians during the Late Ceramic Age (AD 1000-1492).

Through extensive archaeological and documentary research, this study aims to provide a detailed analysis of the maritime cultural landscape of St. Eustatius over the past four centuries. It focuses on bridging the gap between the marine and terrestrial worlds and demonstrates that in order to truly…

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors.

Studium Generale

By examining the impact of Islam on the daily life of those living under its rule, the goal of this project is to understand the striking newness of Islamic society and its debt to the diverse cultures it superseded. Questions will be the extent, character, and ambition of Muslim state competency at…

Escritura de Ñuu Dzaui

How do documentary moving images and fictional narratives involve and evolve each other?

Bachelor, Master

This Festschrift in honour of Cary J. Martin

This paper will address how digital affordances (Grasseni and Walter 2014) of the interactive documentary are an epistemological tool that shapes and fosters comparative reflections in collaborative ethnographic projects. To do so, I will analyse the process of planning and coding an i-doc (interactive…

How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities…

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

Are you eager to explore traditional and experimental audiovisual methods for ethnographic research? Do you consider translating your research findings into a documentary? Are you highly motivated, committed and hard working? Then Visual Ethnography is the right specialisation for you! Visual Ethnography…

The WARN project seeks to understand why certain warnings fail to reach and impact decision makers in time to avert crisis.

This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Sources for those who want to familiarise themselves with the region.

Classics and Ancient Civilizations covers one year and can be studied in four programmes, one of them is Egyptology. When you choose to study this programme, you will both be guided through the broadness of Egyptological sub-disciplines, as well as gradually led to develop your own specific research…

How do sign languages change and spread over time, and how is this influenced by their transmission history?

This research project is supported by an NWO Aspasia grant, DeepDish TV, crowd-sourced funding, and the Democracy and Media Foundation.

The master's specialisation in Visual Ethnography enables you to combine technical mastery of audiovisual production with ethnographic research skills. Your experience ranges from project design to field studies, to scholarly output.

Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography is a state-of-the-art introduction to this dynamic and growing subject. The authors explain its fundamental aspects in a clear and systematic way.

This talk will be hosted on Thursday, 7 November 2024 at 6:00 pm.

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas.

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

Documentary screening

The aim of this research is to investigate the informative potential of drawings and decorations in Italian secular cantata manuscripts from the seventeenth century.

This book examines the role of memory in animation, as well as the ways in which the medium of animation can function as a technology of remembering and forgetting. By doing so, it establishes a platform for the cross-fertilization between the burgeoning fields of animation studies and memory studie…

How was time understood during the colonial period by Tlaxcaltecan Naua communities? What is the relationship between time, spirituality and ritual in the present-day Naua community of Santa Catarina? What does this tell us about the strengths and values of Indigenous heritage and about the impact of…

The master's specialisation in Visual Ethnography emphasises a strongly hands-on, empirical approach, which requires students to play an active role in mastering the audiovisual toolbox.

How was FDR's image constructed—by himself and others—as such a powerful icon in American memory?

This project aims to open up the pre-Islamic linguistic history of Arabia through the systematic study of the Thamudic inscriptions within a digital humanities framework.

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

The Near East, situated at the nexus of Europe, Africa, and Asia, was central to the development of ancient societies in all three continents.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

In Shimmering Images, Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change.

LENS is engaged in the drawing up a cartography of the mediascape, past and present, researching the dispositifs and ecologies of image production and presentation, which stretch across diverse geo-political areas as well as institutional, discursive and technological fields.

Anna Scott is a Canadian pianist-researcher interested in using the early twentieth century recordings of the Brahms circle of pianists to question persistent gaps between the loci of knowledge, ethics, and act in both modern mainstream and historically-informed performances of Brahms’s late piano w…

LUCIS produces various video series and MOOCs to showcase the variety of expertise available at Leiden University.

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…

The Dutch Center for Travel Writing Studies s a scientific center that develops and coordinates initiatives to promote research into travel writing. It actively seeks contact with external (scientific and social) partners to collaborate on issues surrounding cultural / national identity, cultural contact…