Introduction

Adhyāyas 96 – 112. The Varāha Cycle and the Andhaka Cycle Continued

MA student African Studies Eline Sleurink is currently on an internship in Accra, the capital of Ghana. She’s sharing her adventures on The Leidener, a blog that is run by international students of Leiden University.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

Professor Peter Bisschop, lecturer in Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia, has been awarded a grant by the NWO Free Competition to fund his research into the rapid growth of Saivism in the sixth and seventh centuries in South and Southeast Asia. The research project, entitled ‘From Universe…

History can be found in utensils and in interviews with ordinary citizens. ‘With the reconstruction of everyday life, an anthropological approach works better,’ thinks historian Jan-Bart Gewald. Inaugural lecture on 6 June.

Are you thinking about studying Arts and Culture: Art History and Museum Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

SciSTIP was established on 1 April 2014 as part of the DSI-NRF Centres of Excellence Programme funded by the South Africa’s National Research Foundation (https://www.nrf.ac.za/). SciSTIP is hosted by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University and…

The Vici project Through the Hands of Signers invites everyone to participate in its kick-off symposium on the History of Sign Language Emergence, Transmission, and Change on July 10 2026.

Last year, LUCSoR welcomed two new Ph.D. students from Iran: Kiyan Foroutan from Ahvaz and Amir Ardalan Emami from Tehran. Kiyan works on a project on the role of the family in medieval and early modern Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (15th-18th centuries). Ardalan works on a much earlier period, the…

Maritime conflict management is the regulation of conflict in relation to the sea. It comprises conflict enforcement, conflict resolution and conflict avoidance. How did victims of maritime conflicts claim and obtain damages or demand compensation or reparation?

Which plants in the Mediterranean garden were already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and how were they utilized?

A collaboration between linguists, geographers and anthropologists aims to uncover how languages spread across South America over thousands of years. Associate Professor Rik van Gijn is responsible for the linguistic side of this NWO project.

This project aims to produce empirical data on migration processes in non-Western locales, and to contribute to migration studies theory-building with new insights and through comparative perspective.

In his new six-hour series, Africa's Great Civilizations, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes a new look at the history of Africa, from the birth of humankind to the dawn of the 20th century. One of the experts interviewed in the programme is our own dr. Sada Mire.

Africa is online. Leiden Africa expert Mirjam de Bruijn is fascinated by the fast development of mobile telephony and social media in Africa. She maintains a website on the topic, focusing on isolated, marginalised and conflict-ridden areas in Middle Africa.

This project will construct an inventory of possible conceptions of the resistance of the world to scientists’ claims and theories.

Visiting Researchers at the Leiden University Institute for History

From the very beginning, the Islam has known an oral tradition. It was only two hundred years ago that Muslims starting writing about the history of Islam, on rocks or other hard materials. Arabic epigraphy (study of inscriptions) turns out to be an essential tool in historical genealogy research. Abdullah…

In the Netherlands, when we talk about the United Nations, the conversation is almost always about the member states from the northern hemisphere. But the most interesting players come from the ‘Global South’, Professor Alanna O'Malley and her team argue in a podcast.

Africa is rising and increasingly seen as a potential market by economic actors from Africa and the rest of the world. What is the interrelationship between governance, entrepreneurship and inclusive development?

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

This project is part of a broader research agenda aiming to better understand the relationships between the development of contemporary security concerns and the evolution of forms of security cooperation and crisis governance.

Who still remembers that Leiden attracted a lot of reds from Suriname during the 1970s? The exhibition ‘Dynamic Suriname’ offers a number of surprising insights on the links between Leiden University and Suriname, which is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its independence this year.

This project receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101054849 (PURANA).

Carsten Stahn has just published Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities and Access to Culture. The book is part of the OUP Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Series.

The symposium “Human-Wildlife conflicst in Africa” was held on the 27th October in the Academie gebouw of Leiden University in honor of the retirement of Prof.dr.ir. Hans H. de Iongh

On 22 August, the GO-FAIR IN Africa was launched: an implementation network under the GO FAIR efforts to train, build and change the next generation of the Internet of FAIR Data and Services (IFDS).

Aron is a second-year student of Korean Studies. He was in Seoul as part of the stay-abroad portion of the program when Leiden University took measures due to the coronavirus. He and his fellow students decided to let the last flight back to the Netherlands pass to stay in South Korea.

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2024.

What are the rights of migrants in Morocco and how do this receiving state and migrants deal with them in practice?

What is federalism; what are the implications of decentralisation? Do federalism and decentralisation contribute to democratisation, governance, and diversity? Virtually all African countries south of the Sahara are now either federal or decentralised—but how do their systems of governance perform?…

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research…

In this book Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later.

Ramesh Ganohariti will examine legal identity in three post-Soviet aspirant states and outline four common scenarios in this article.

Although official law generally conceives of personal injury victims as individual rights holders, the actual experience of physical injury and its consequences is relational. Indeed, many researchers in the global North as well as the global South have contended that the very concept of the Self should…

It recently emerged that a Swiss firm secretly owned by the CIA and the West German intelligence service BND had been selling manipulated coding equipment to numerous governments, including allies, to spy on them through a Swiss cover firm for years.

Describing almost 1400 maps of Africa in three months. It’s no small task that student assistants Artemis Mantheakis and Beatriz Veiga have been working on within the joint ASCL-UBL Africa Maps Project. The project’s aim is to describe and catalogue a 20th-century map collection of the library of the…

Investigating the contribution of interpreters, informants, hunters and guides in the making of colonial scientific knowledge.

How was the future United Nations Organization promoted to global publics during WW II?

By adding their signature to the collaboration agreement on 31 May, Leiden University, TU Delft, space research institute SRON and NWO confirmed the move of SRON from Utrecht to South Holland. From 2021, the headquarters of the space research institute will be located on the Campus of Leiden Univ…

This summer, PhD students Marta Maggioni and Rosa Winter went to Africa. Not just to enjoy the beautiful continent, but also to stir up the enthusiasm of young students for mathematics. They volunteered at math camps in Kenya and Ghana. ‘I think it is important they experience the fun of maths.’