Recently, there have been some changes in the General Board of the N.W. Posthumus Institute. Because of her retirement, Professor Marlou Schrover also retired from the General Board as well as from the Executive Committee of the N.W. Posthumus Institute. Her place as representative of Leiden University in the General Board has now been taken…

On 11 March 2026, Posthumus alumna Yannis Skalli-Housseini successfully defended the thesis ‘In the Name of Distributive Justice: Debating Fiscal Reform in 18th-Century Flanders’ at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Supervisor were is Professor Wouter Ryckbosch (Ghent University) and Dr Klaas Van Gelder (VUB). Yannis’ dissertation contributes to the recent historiographical re-evaluation of the rise of…

~ because of scope an required proficiency in Dutch only ~ Het Departement Erfgoedstudies van de Faculteit Ontwerpwetenschappen aan de Universiteit van Antwerpen zoekt een voltijdse (100%) doctoraatsbursaal in het kader van het FWO project ‘Labore et Constantia. Continuïteit en verandering in de werkritmes in de Plantijnse drukkerij (ca. 1580-1840)’. Hoeveel uur werkten vroegmoderne mensen…

Palgrave Macmillan recently published a new open-access publication, authored by Posthumus fellow Dr Gijs Dreijers, Private Entrepreneurship and European Imperialism: Dutch Entrepreneurs in the Scramble for Africa, 1830s-1910s in the Palgrave Studies in Economic History book series. This open access book presents a new perspective on European imperialism in Africa, by focusing on the role…

On 3 and 4 December 2026, Ghent University will host the conference, ‘Bridging Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Environmental History of the Low Countries’. The conference is a collaboration between researchers on the medieval and (early) modern Low Countries and the Roman Society Research Center. The conference wants to encourage the exchange of recent research,…

~ because of scope in Dutch only ~ De Werkgroep Stadsgeschiedenis organiseert in juni twee bijeenkomsten. Op donderdag 4 juni 2026 is er van 9:30 tot 12:30 uur in Leiden een bijeenkomst over ‘Nieuw onderzoek naar stadswording in de middeleeuwen en vroegmoderne tijd’. Op vrijdag 12 juni 2026 vindt er vanaf 10:30 uur een stadswandeling…

Open Science NL recently awarded the project ‘Chains of the Past: Open Infrastructure for the Global History of Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade’ with an Open Science Infrastructure Grant of 1.5 million euros. In this project, jointly organised by Radboud University, the International Institute of Social History (IISG) and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast…

On 9 February 2026, the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW; The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities) has appointed its new members, among whom Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Professor of Economic and Social History at Utrecht University and member of the General Board and Executive Committee of the N.W. Posthumus Institute. The KHMW,…

In the most recent funding round, the netherlands eScience center awarded a substantial in-kind contribution to the project ‘From rags to riches: A pipeline for processing semi-structured handwritten texts’ (Rags2Riches) as a result of the Open eScience Call 2025. The team involved in this project consists of researchers from various universities: Dr Auke Rijpma, Dr…

Posthumus fellows Dr Ramona Négron and Dr Karwan Fatah-Black invite research paper proposals for the workshop ‘Reinterpreting the Caribbean age of revolutions: Slave revolts, their non-slave participants and proto-citizenship’, to be held on 23 October 2026 at the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden. Historians have found that in the…