Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, has great historical and cultural significance. The city was captured and occupied by the Islamic State in early June 2014 and one month later Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi used Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque to declare the formation of the caliphate. After a fierce battle, the city was liberated in 2017, however, large parts of the city, including most of the old city, were completely destroyed. Currently, the city is undergoing reconstruction. This book focuses on that...

In the ‘Anatomy lessons’ that were painted for the Surgeons’ Guild in Amsterdam, the surgeons portrayed, their teachers, the corpse and the dissection are described and discussed.

The year 2024 marks the opening of the new Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University, a purpose-built facility to serve the needs of all those who engage in the study of the Middle East and North Africa from the dawn of history to the present day. To celebrate the occasion, more than 40 authors from Leiden and beyond have contributed to this special volume on the library’s rich and multifaceted Oriental holdings.

Topics range from the Ancient Near East to the material and conservational ...

Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourses of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. 'Black Transnationalism and Japan' introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often e...

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in Rembrandt’s Time focuses on the generation of rich young men that grew up in the seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic. These men had more money to spend on clothes, music, and recreation than the generation before them. This fascinating account of male adolescence in the Dutch Republic reveals how young men including Rembrandt van Rijn disregarded conservative values and rebelled against the older generation, and consequently created a new youth culture ...