On Thursday 28 March 2024 Said Reza Huseini successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In a rapidly changing world it is crucial that our teaching keeps pace with the dynamics of society.

Correctly interpreting the patterns of fire evidence in the archaeological record will illuminate the origin of human fire use.

What is the role of local authorities and communities in shaping how inter-Schengen borders are understood and dealt with?

How do Chinese language teachers negotiate who they are as teachers when they work abroad? This dissertation offers clear, practice-oriented answers. It examines teacher identity - the everyday answer to 'What kind of teacher am I here?' - as it is reshaped through classroom interactions, institutional…

Making sense of the world around us depends on the fundamental ability to parse the world into distinct objects and keep track of them. This process is defined as object individuation. Research indicates that it is not always easy for infants.

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The Leiden Leadership Centre (LLC) at Leiden University is a platform for research and education in the field of public leadership, based in The Hague. We aim to advance knowledge and contribute to the development of public leadership - both in science and in practice.

The Flentrop Organ is the third organ to have been built for the Great Auditorium in the Academy Building in Leiden.

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

Leiden was European City of Science in 2022: for a year Leiden was the capital of European science. Leiden University was a proud partner of Leiden2022.

The Modern and Contemporary Cluster is the largest within LUCAS and home to more than 100 staff members and PhD candidates. Hosting a diverse group of young and advanced scholars, it offers an especially fruitful and dynamic environment for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Below you can find information about the research projects on public leadership of the public management research group at the Institute of Public Administration.

Water, Urbanism, and Sustainability in Roman Ostia

In this project diverse aspects of the duchesses’ roles in the complex and dynamic relations between town and crown are studied on the basis of systematic research in the account books of four cities (Ghent, Bruges, Leuven and Mechelen) in the Burgundian Netherlands (ca. 1430-1503).

Environmental Humanities is one of the LUCAS research themes, bringing together members of the three LUCAS clusters.

This programme examines cultural space, national identity and the politics of tangible and intangible heritage in Islamic Central Asia.

This research explores the question of what contemporary mapmaking practices can reveal about the ever-evolving field of graphic design.

Profile Area Political Legitimacy, Leiden University

Researchers at Leiden Observatory study the fundamental physics that creates structure in the Universe. These processes collect matter into galaxies and gas into stars. With the use of powerful telescopes and advanced calculations and computer simulations, Leiden astronomers seek to understand the origin,…

This paper examines cyber intelligence in the context of national and international security.

Research in and through art is an inseparable part of the artistic or design practice of the researcher. Consequently, research-in-art (as opposed to research-about-art, such as art history) does not have a set goal or expected result, nor are there predetermined general procedures. The outcome of the…

This NWO-funded VICI project (2025-2030) led by Prof.dr. Petra M. Sijpesteijn examines the place-making processes in the early Islamic Empire.

Landscapes of mobility in the northern Chilean altiplano: from chiefly networks to colonial markets (AD 1100-1800).

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

This is the 2017 paperback release of William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, which won the 2013 Foreign Affairs Magazine Best Book of the Year.

The Decolonising Collective Leiden is a platform for staff and students interested in exploring strategies to foster pluralistic, diverse, and decolonised knowledge production at Leiden University. While many discussions about decolonisation are ongoing in discrete spaces across the University, there…

From self-driving cars to innovative drug development: artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change our lives in many different ways. We study this technology at a deep and fundamental level. And we seek answers to questions about liability and privacy, for example. Our researchers from…

In Quantum mechanics, particles can be in multiple positions simultaneously. Yet, when a measurement is made, the particle is found only in one place. Technology has come to a point where we may design experiments that will tell us how.

This study aims to provide a long time perspective of human landscape manipulation. Studying the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems is of great importance to establish the character of past 'natural' landscapes and to enhance the management of current ones.

How can we understand the encounter between communities active in sustainability initiatives and governmental agents at the multiple institutional layers in the Netherlands?

How can the integration of innovative technologies, circular material flows, and resource efficiency strategies accelerate the transition to a CO₂-neutral, circular, and high-tech steel sector by 2050, and how can Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), and Techno-Economic Analysis…

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

Methodology & Statistics offers bachelor's courses and a master's specialisation.

Leiden University offers you several services related to career orientation and job application skills

Leiden University offers you several services related to career orientation and job application skills.

This PhD project investigates the forms, functions, meanings, and socio-cultural values embedded in Palenda, in order to understand how it reflects and shapes the worldview of the Muna people (Mieno Wuna) through metaphor.

The project GRADIENTS investigates what it meant to be European in colonial Africa where identification as European often did not depend on skin colour and was understood on a spectrum with many gradients.

2 joint initiatives began in 2019 which attempt to connect the various efforts around active learning at Leiden University: the active learning network, and the Saltswat project.

How can we promote more durable solutions to protracted refugee situations and which roles can connectivity and mobility of displaced people play to improve protection and resilience?

Material Crossovers

Don’t wait until you’ve been hacked: how we should prepare for cybercriminals

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden University with the American University in Cairo.

Despite their ecological, cultural, and economic importance, lion (Panthera leo) populations in Kenya are declining rapidly due to retaliatory killings following livestock depredation, depletion of wild prey, habitat loss driven by human activities, climate change, and disease.

Do you have a curious character and do you want to know how knowledge is sought at the university? Do you want to acquire knowledge and skills that could not only be important for your everyday life, but could also mean a lot for your future? Then the Pre-University College The Hague is definitely for…

This project investigates ethnographically how patients, their relatives, and healthcare professionals in the Netherlands make decisions about end-of-life care. We study the new dilemmas around what constitutes

How the systematic destruction of valuables created value in Bronze Age Europe, c. 2300-500 BC

Researchers using remote sensing technologies have characterized pre-Columbian regularly-shaped earthworks in forests in Central America and the Amazon. In tropical forested mountains in South America, two challenges arise when identifying archaeological sites through remote sensing. Firstly, sites…

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.