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.

Muslim scholars work in a long and rich tradition of knowledge-production in their own culture.

Fieldwork is an essential part of this research and of course this part of the project is also a joint effort by citizen scientists and professional archaeologists. Discover when fieldwork will take place and how you can participate.

Most of the PhD graduates (about 70 percent) find a job outside of academia. The majority of them successfully embark on a career in education, administration, heritage, journalism, or business. Other PhD graduates find employment in an academic or semi-academic environment. A considerable number of…

Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco

The ASCL Research Programme for the years 2019-2024 is called ‘Strident Africa: Societal and Environmental Change in the Context of 50 Centuries of History’. It examines the dramatic changes taking place on the continent in terms of population growth, urbanization, the role of external actors and the…

Artful Mathematics: The Heritage of M. C. Escher

During the early modern period, many medieval manuscripts were cut up into strips of parchment which were reused to reinforce the bindings of newly printed books. Until recently, these reused pieces of medieval manuscripts only came to light when the early modern book binding was damaged and/or subjected…

High resolution altitude data created by airborne LiDAR allow the investigation of large areas and often inaccessible tracts of land and has the potential to reveal undiscovered archaeological heritage.

The manual analysis of remotely-sensed data is a widespread practice in local and regional scale archaeological research, as well as heritage management.

The master’s programme in Archaeology at Leiden University is the most diverse in the Netherlands. There are several regional and thematic focus areas and research is incorporated in the education programme. Join our international classroom: half of the students come from outside The Netherlands, as…

Leiden is a real student city and has everything you’ll need to turn your time as a student into the time of your life

Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines offers a compelling reflection on what the notion of legibility entails in a machinic world in which any form of cultural expression – from literary texts, films, artworks and museum exhibits to archives, laws, computer programs and algorithms – necessarily…

Leiden University has a long tradition in the collaboration with Indonesia.

This programme aims to make the digitized archival sources of the Kerala and Tamil Nadu Archives more accessible to Indian and international scholars and to the widest possible audience, in particular to the people of Kerala.

The Faculty of Archaeology offers a dynamic research environment for PhD candidates. Their projects at the Faculty span all fields in archaeological research, from fieldwork to lab work and heritage issues, from prehistoric to modern times, worldwide.

Over time Dutch and Indonesian composers, performers and music scholars have inspired each other and they continue to do so. The presence of the Dutch in the Netherlands East-Indies and Indonesia, but also the existence of large diasporic communities in the Netherlands have contributed to a mutual exchange…

PhD Candidates are encouraged to start thinking about job prospects well before the defence of their thesis. This page contains information about how to prepare yourself.

Silk Road Virtual Museum - A virtual museum of the art and culture of the regions that lay on the trade routes between Europe and Asia, popularly known as the ‘Silk Road’.

In the civil war in Syria, the country's cultural heritage is also under threat. There have been further acts of vandalism in Palmyra and many of the city's museums have been looted. Leiden archaeologist Olivier Nieuwenhuijse's Focus Raqqa project aims to make a digital inventory of the plundered archaeology…

The aim of the project is to contribute to the process of archive formation ongoing in Post-Apartheid South Africa through the inclusion of photographs that have been either unacknowledged or excised from the national canon.

Exhibition

This project investigates the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies and discourses.

Cynthia van Vonno, political scientist at Leiden University, explains why individual MPs vote according to the party group line.

The role of religion in the identity construction of LGBTQIA+ folks

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

What was the relationship between women and modern media in different parts of Asia in the 20th century? Under what historical and social conditions did women achieve prominence in popular music in Asia?

The Ra’s al-jinz project tackles economic diversification and social complexity in non-urban societies, from the perspective of Eastern Arabia, by exploring the Early Bronze Age settlement of Ra’s al-jinz RJ-3.

We would all like to live in a world in which individuals feel safe, conflicts are resolved peacefully and the interests of future generations are taken into consideration. At Leiden University legal scholars investigate to what extent public international law meets the needs of a globalised society.…

Non-urban settlement organization and Roman expansion in the Roman Republic (4th-1st centuries BC)

The ability to collect and interpret huge quantities of data has become indispensable to society and academia. Leiden University is a knowledge and expertise centre for data science that places the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.

How can we organise society so as to keep our planet habitable for us and for all other life forms around us? To answer this question, Leiden researchers collaborate across disciplines, from biology to data science, and from environmental economy to archaeology.

Uniting an international consortium of scholars, the Skandapurāṇa Project comprises a team of researchers working in fields across the Humanities. We are creating a critical edition of a foundational work of purāṇic literature and, in doing so, tracing the dynamics of a textual tradition to better understand…

On November 25, Dr Araceli Rojas presented her book El tiempo y la sabiduría: un calendario sagrado entre los ayöök de Oaxaca. The event took place in the Central Public Library of the State of Oaxaca, in the heart of Oaxaca City, at 7 pm.

PhD defence

At the end of the fifteenth century, two intriguing Christian epics were written in Virgilian Latin by the poets Sannazaro and Vida. They did so in accordance with the wishes of the pope. These epics, both praised and criticized by contemporaries, are often seen as innovative for their specific combination…

We live in a data-drenched society awash with numbers. An inhabitant of the democratic polis of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.) increasingly found himself surrounded by numerical data. This project aims to analyze the communicative functions and the political meaning(s) ascribed to these public…

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

For some devout Muslims, going to the cinema or viewing certain images is provocative and problematic. Ahmad Nuril Huda investigated the development Santri (young, pious Muslims) have undergone in this field over the past ten years. The Cinematic Santri is the result of his PhD research.

Liselotta Jahnke, Jason Irwin, Rachel Cruickshank and Paula Kovač are the new student members of the Programme Committee (OLC). This committee advises the Executive Board and the Faculty Board of CADS about educational matters, such as determining the Course and Examination Regulations and evaluating…

Cultural Anthropologist Erik de Maaker published, together with Monica Janoswki (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia in Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS).

The Persian language and its poetry are intertwined with the history of Central Asia. Although some mediaeval poets were later claimed by an individual state, their influence knew no frontiers. This is what Gabrielle van den Berg, Professor of Cultural History of Iran and Central Asia, argues in her…