Olivier Nieuwenhuijse, project leader of the project Focus Raqqa, was hosted by the NOS Radio 1 news broadcast on February 16, 2017.

This project aims to revisit the ways in which religious minorities in the Middle East participated in, contributed to, and opposed the Arab nationalism of the post-war years, when the British and French ruled the region via the Mandates. Research question: How did religious minorities in the Middle…

How did free agents oppose the monopolies held by the VOC and WIC in court?

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe.

This volume sees the publication of fifty-six early Old Babylonian letters from ca. 1880 BCE. They were found by legendary Iraqi archaeologist Taha Baqir in 1941 at the site of Tell ed-Dēr, ancient Sippar-Amnānum, in central Iraq.

On June 14th, Jeroen Duindam, Professor of History at the Faculty of Humanities, was awarded an exceptionally high distinction for his achievements in the field of Austrian history.

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…

Questions of justice are not only the concern of legal professionals, politicians and activists, they also permeate culture at large. Literature, Cinema, Music and Artworks often revolve around questions about rights, justice and fairness, raising a wide range of issues, such as: how do we understand…

HOME will search for a diversity of Palaeolithic shelters during the Late Pleistocene through informed systematic surveys and excavations of archaeological sites in East-Central Europe.

The Research Catalogue (RC) is a searchable database for archiving artistic research. It comprises an open source, online, collaborative workspace application for the archiving, designing and publishing of artistic research.

Study information, Webinar

With the departure of Tesse Stek to the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome for three years, Andrzej Antczak will take over the role of Departmental Head for World Archaeology in September 2018. We spoke with him to learn more about his background, ideas, and plans for the future.

Elizabeth Hicks won first runner-up in the Netherlands Institute of the Near East (NINO) MA thesis 2021 competition at the end of January.

Two hundred years ago Caspar Reuvens was appointed as the first professor of archaeology in the Netherlands. He was to lay the basis for both the National Museum of Antiquities and the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University. To mark the occasion, the faculty is organising an anniversary lecture…

The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Jordan’s North-Eastern Desert and Beyond

The Van Loon project sets out to safeguard the archives of Dutch archaeologist Maurits van Loon (Amsterdam, September 22, 1923 - Montpellier, October 12, 2006) and make them accessible for further study.

Lecture, Descriptive Linguistics Seminars

Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.

200 years ago, in 1818, Caspar Reuvens was appointed Professor in Archaeology at Leiden University. This was effectively the start of the academic study of archaeology in the Netherlands. To celebrate this occasion, the faculty organises events related to the future of archaeology throughout the yea…

The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Culture Versus the Rise of Modern Art (1860-1915)

Dutch archaeologists are making three-dimensional virtual reconstructions of archaeological objects lost in the Syrian civil war.

Essays in Honour of Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse

Dr Bleda Düring deemed it was time for an archaeological approach on the imperialisation of Assyria. ‘While there are lot of archaeological studies of Assyrian sites, they are not really trying to address this broader picture of imperialism and how this imperialisation actually worked.’ These imperialisation…

At the Faculty of Archaeology, three new professors are appointed with effect from February 1, 2018. They are Ann Brysbaert, Marie Soressi, and Joanita Vroom. How do they react to their appointments, and what will be their foci in the following years?

“Winner CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award 2016” A Cultural History

'The Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia' explores the nature and implications of civil society across the region, engaging systematically with both theoretical approaches and empirical nuance for a systematic, comparative, and informative approach.

The journey of sugar from east to west

To what extent and in what manner can experimental video be used to reclaim the capacity for telling one’s own story, on one's own terms, speaking in tongues outside the linguistic framework of immune system discourse?

This volume considers the military architecture and its impact on local communities in Rome's eastern frontier, which stretched from the north-east shore of the Black Sea to the Red Sea.

On Friday 2 October journalist Sander van Hoorn starts his lecture series ‘The Middle East doesn't exist’, which was organised by the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). ‘If all goes well, people will understand the Middle East that bit less after my lectures.’

The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) is devoted to the study of places in the human world from antiquity to the present time in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

For the eleventh time in a row, Leiden University’s unique liberal arts and sciences programme has been awarded the ‘Top Rated Programme’ quality seal by Keuzegids universiteiten 2024.

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…

Study information, Admission & Application Workshop

This project investigates the transposition of natural historical material, knowledge and vision, between different media (collection, scientific drawing, academic texts, the visual arts and/or literature) – a transmission that happens in the borderline between the traditional, emblematic worldview…

The prestigious Praemium Erasmianum Dissertation Prize is annually awarded to the five best dissertations published in the year before in the fields of Humanities, Social sciences and Law. During a festive ceremony in Utrecht Lennart Kruijer received the award from the hands of professor Bas ter Haar…

What can Robotics and AI bring to archaeological theory and practice? In return, how can archaeology contribute to the developments in robotics and AI research? Colleagues tackled these questions at an event organised by the Faculty of Archaeology and sponsored by SAILS.

The Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University is a partner in the new university-wide Data Science research programme that advocates the use of data science in various fields of research.