Hugo Koning, an expert in Greek mythology, has won the Lucas Public Prize because he has brought his research to the attention of the general public in so many different ways. This is the first Public Prize awarded by the Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS). Hugo says with a smile:…

Dr Mark Leiser, Assistant Professor in Law and Digital Technologies at eLaw, is part of a successful €1.5 million bid for a research grant from the acclaimed Volkswagen Institute on “Reclaiming individual autonomy and democratic discourse online: How to rebalance human and algorithmic decision makin…

On Monday 30 September, Leiden University was one of the partners proud to announce the launch of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) - an international consortium of research funders, academic institutions, and technologists working to champion the latest approaches to research on research.

What kinds of vocal music were not typically transmitted in written musical notation? Can specific ‘lost’ song forms - siciliane, giustiniane, le Grechesche, gli stili “regionali“ nel canto del quattrocento - be more precisely identified than they have been until now, both in musicological research…

Early Christian Encounters with Town and Countryside - Essays on the Urban and Rural Worlds of Early Christianity.

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

How are contemporary art practices from Southeast Asia negotiating notions of art and tradition?

This series of publications brings together new material on wellconsidered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies.

From Crisis to Critique

In Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, Emeritus Professor Mineke Schipper reflects on myths about ‘the end’.

The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the…

Sanne Dokter-Mersch defended her thesis on Thursday 15 April 2021.

Clara ten Hacken defended her thesis on 16 December 2015

An interdisciplinary cultural analysis of how the Hindustani double migration informs contemporary processes of identification and problematises the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

At LUCL, researchers aim to understand, describe, and preserve the linguistic diversity of the indigenous Americas.

The Phantom of the Ego is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity.

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…

This book argues that the combined literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence supports the theory that early-imperial Italy had about six million inhabitants.

The topic of Historical Linguistics and Philology at LUCL is language change in its broadest sense.

The writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are famously and purposely marked by fragmentariness. Paradoxically, a central aim of his work was to connect: all his life he sought to further the integration of scholarship in the humanities which, he believed, had too long suffered from the prevalence…

The Dutch colonial past in Indonesia has had a major influence on literature.

Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality.

This dissertation provides an up to date description of the Indo European lexical stock of Armenian (ca. 500 entries) with systematic inclusion of unused data that are found in Armenian dialects.

While Nietzsche's works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche's work.

It is integral to many cluster members’ research to use Medieval and Early Modern Arts as a lens for studying the medieval and early modern periods at large:

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

On Friday 22 November 2024 Ye Jiang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

How to related figures of savages to conceptions of history?

The multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying artistic, literary, political and religious ideologies.

Get the most out of your studies at Leiden University by taking part in our extracurricular activities.

Building a lively Humanities Campus with renewed and sustainable buildings surrounded by a green outdoor space.

The author Manon Uphoff from Utrecht will be Leiden University’s new ‘writer in residence’ from autumn 2025. As the writer in residence, Uphoff will contribute to several courses on writing offered by the BA Dutch Language and Culture programme.

Lecture

This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Five master's programmes from the Faculty of Humanities scored highly in Keuzegids 2026.

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

The seminar series on ‘Diversity and Inclusion in Global Science’ aims to foster debate on inequalities in science across the world.

Psycholinguistic research

Papyrology+, founded in 2014, is a collaboration of Leiden scholars studying (Abnormal) Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Arabic papyri from a socio-historical, economic and linguistic perspective. Papyrology+ aims to explore new opportunities and directions in the study of ancient…

Read more about the partner organizations of the Summerschool Global History in the 2020s.

The subjects of the texts vary from Demosthenes to the delivery of camels in early Islamic Egypt, and their provenances stretch from the Eastern to the Western Desert, and from the Egyptian Nile valley to Qasr Ibrim in northern Nubia.

Do you have a question about student life in Leiden, studying at Leiden University or do you want more information about a specific course? You can get in contact with a student from the Linguistics master's directly!

Many thanks for visiting the Master’s Open Day on Friday 15 March! We hope that you enjoyed the day and that all your questions were answered.

In Renaissance Florence, humanists wrote Latin poems fashioning their city as the new Rome, and members of the Medici family as Roman rulers. How can we explain this practice?