In the context of the summer school "Medieval Religon" prof. Christopher M. Bellitto (Kean University) will give a keynote lecture on June 26th: "Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and Today: Thoughts of an American Medievalist". This lecture is also open to those interested who do not participate…

The Research Training Group “Byzantium and the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War” invites scholars to submit paper proposals for a series of sessions on “Perceptions of Just War in the Middle Ages” at the IMC 2025. These sessions aim to explore the diverse theological, philosophical, legal, and cultural…

In this special edition of Information Polity there is a focus on the transparency challenges of using algorithms in government in decision-making procedures at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels.

On Wednesday 3 July 2024 Renata Schiavo successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The sites of Norman Estata, Anse des Pères and Hope Estate with a contribution to the 'La Hueca problem'

On Monday 3 September, the ARC forum (art_research_convergence) will come together in The Grey Space in the Middle in The Hague. The forum, initiated by the Leiden University Academy for Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) is focused on the presentation and discussion of artistic research.

Exploitation of smaller game is rarely documented before the latest phases of the Pleistocene, which is often taken to imply narrow diets for earlier hominins. In a study now published in Scientific Reports, a team of German and Dutch archaeologists present new data that contradict this view of Lower…

How have Muslims imagined the world before Muhammad? Stories about pre-Islamic times feature across all genres and periods of Arabic literature, and while many writers have derided the pre-Islamic past as disorderly paganism, others celebrate its memory as a time of Arab nobility and fine literature.…

On an excavation site in Oegstgeest Leiden University archaeologists discovered a very rare silver bowl from the first half of the seventh century. The bowl is decorated with gold-plated representations of animals and plants and inlaid with semi-precious stones. The discovery suggests the existence…

Arts and culture

On 30 May, Gert Jan Boeve defended the thesis 'The general right of suspension'. The doctoral research was supervised by Bart Krans and Alex Geert Castermans.

A comparative study on the spatial origin and development of towns in the northern Netherlands, 700-1400.

City dwellers in the Middle Ages were probably no worse off than people living in villages. Both groups had very different health risks, is Rachel Schats' conclusion from her research on bone material. PhD defence 3 November.

On Thursday the 15th of March, an exhibition displaying funerary masterpieces of Deir el-bersha was opened at the Egyptian museum on the occasion of 120 years of archaeological research at the site. The exhibit runs until 15 April.

In this book, Vanessa Newby provides the first detailed examination of credibility’s essential place in peacekeeping.

This research investigates everyday lives and workplace experiences of Iranian workers employed at textile industry, which was the second biggest industry after oil following the latter’s discovery in 1908.

On Thursday 27 June 2024 Sigrid van Roode successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration provides a complete exploration of the prominent themes, events, and theoretical underpinnings of the movements of human populations from prehistory to the present day.

Our research at CWTS is organized in three focal areas. These focal areas represent our core areas of interest, as defined in our knowledge agenda for the period 2023-2028.

The Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden is the leading academic institute for Archaeology in the Netherlands, and one of the largest in the world. The Faculty is an international front-runner, in the top ten of the QS World University Ranking, at subject level.

Finding solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the not-inconsiderable task of the new Peace Academy in The Hague. Professor Maurits Berger and twelve students from different conflict zones are starting a creative thinking process that aims to discover the basic conditions for peace in the…

A selected group of unpublished amulets from various collections in the world will be studied and edited.

On Wednesday 23 October 2024 Judith Jurjens successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Political scientist Kevin Köhler (Leiden University) has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). This prestigious grant enables him to set up a research group in the coming five years. Köhler and his team will examine how elite conflict affects processes of regime change…

On January 17th, Frits Scholten (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) will give a lecture titled: "Private Devotion & Immersive Play - The Use of 'Spiritual Toys' in the Late Middle Ages." The lecture is part of a Lorentz Center workshop on 'Religious Imagination in the Late Medieval Low Countries' and can also be…

From October 17 to October 20, the international conference "Patristic Sermons in the Middle Ages: Collections, Mediators and the Practice of Compiling" will take place at the Dutch Royal Institute in Rome. Research Master students can obtain 2 ECTS by participating in this conference an an additional…

This series of seminars convenes researchers based in North America and Europe in order to inspire and further establish reflections about race, race-thinking, and racialization among scholars of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first seminar will be held on Monday, October 19, at 12:00 EDT by…

This beautifully illustrated volume investigates the social life of objects moving between the Middle East and the West, revealing the range of agencies and subjectivities involved in their trade and reuse.

Two open letters are currently circulating among civil servants in the Netherlands calling for the Dutch government to take a different stance towards Israel. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law in Leiden, says in a national radio broadcast that this is an unusual and unique…

In the eighties the Umhlatuzana rock shelter in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, was excavated. Results from this excavation led to an understanding when the Later Stone Age started in this area. This archaeological period is often associated with the structural presence of modern human behavior. Now a…

During the 1980s and early 2000s, authors like Alex Schmid and Andrew Silke demonstrated the paucity of first-hand insights being used to study terrorism and the consequences this had for the reliability of the findings beings presented. But to what extent have these issues endured?

Fieldwork

The European Research Council had awarded a Starting Independent Researcher Grant to Bleda Düring for the project Consolidating Empire.Reconstructing Hegemonic Practices of the Middle Assyrian Empire at the Late Bronze Age Fortified Estate of Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria, ca. 1230 – 1180 BC.

The goal is to establish an intuitive search and querying service that allows researchers to quickly retrieve the most valuable digital resources, in order to allow them to integrate and synthesise the results into a coherent narrative of the past. The current focus of the project is to implement…

Two researchers at the Faculty of Archaeology have received a Veni award from the Netherlands Organisation for Academic Research (NWO). This award offers promising young researchers the opportunity to further develop their ideas for a period of three years.