Humanities are needed to make sense of social issues. Watch or listen to the stories of our experts who tell about their research and the impact on society. Get to know the world at Humanities!

From 1550 onwards, a great interest in the natural world developed across Europe. This interest was not only stimulated by a growing knowledge of local flora and fauna, but also by the import of numerous exotic animal and plant species. Think, for instance, of researches and collectors like Gessner…

The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

Research at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) focuses on linguistic variation and diversity. In order to create more awareness and scientific understanding of this topic, research activities are clustered around six (overlapping) umbrella programmes. Many of our researchers are active…

Will Leiden be the first city to have wall poems in sign language? It will, if sign language researcher Victoria Nyst has her way. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Leiden Language Museum and the TEGEN-BEELD Foundation.

In a packed lecture hall at Wijnhaven, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman succinctly summed up the essence of his argument on Wednesday 17 September: ‘Running a good society is hard’. His lecture held up a mirror to economists and policymakers.

Mexico, between 500 B.C. and A.D. 900

The new Middle Eastern Library (MEL) will bring together the UBL's own Middle Eastern collections and the collections of the library of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), which has been part of the Leiden University Libraries since 1st January 2018.

An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Associate Professor of Physical Geography Paul Hudson at Leiden University College was interviewed by TIME Magazine on the Mississippi floods that have been harassing the United States this year.

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Professor Paul van der Heijden (International Labour Law) has been awarded a grant of 50,000 euros by the city council of The Hague to start building a Business & Human Rights database.

In November, Leiden organized a book presentation to celebrate the first Dutch translation of the collected works of the twentieth-century poet W.H. Auden. A poetry translation contest added lustre to the occasion. There were no fewer than three winners.

This dissertation investigates whether and how gradability is manifested in the nominal domain, as well as the implications this could have for theories of the representation of gradability.

Professor Paul van der Heijden (international labour law Leiden University) has been appointed the honorary Marcel Storme chair at the University of Ghent. The Marcel Storme chair is a rotating professorship at the law faculty of the University of Ghent which according to the regulations is solely…

Leiden University 2016 thesis awards were awarded to Kaspar Pucek (History), Mariska Meijer (Bio Medical Sciences) and Paul Kozowyk (Archaeology).

Paul van der Heijden, professor emeritus International Labour Law, was recently appointed by the British Minister for Trade as an independent arbitrator under the dispute settlement provisions of the United Kingdom’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Japan.

Most of us know that Venice, Genoa, and Florence were major Mediterranean powers during the Renaissance. But did you know that in terms of trade and sea power, Barcelona was probably more powerful than two of these three?

Following the murder of two Dutch people - of which Iran is suspected - Trouw investigates how usual these practices are. Paul Abels, Professor of Intelligence Studies and Ben de Jong, Researcher, both working at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), will address the subject.

Constant Hijzen, assistant professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), spoke about the Law on intelligence and security services in the NRC. In the column ‘Twistgesprek’ (dispute) of the NRC Hijzen has a written conversation with the director of Bits for Freedom, Hans de Zwart,…

USMCA (North American Free Trade Agreement) is the successor to NAFTA – a free trade zone covering Canada, the United States and Mexico. This Agreement includes a new procedure to ensure compliance with fundamental labour rights.

This PhD project investigates how nationalist ideas are expressed, shaped, and negotiated in Moroccan Malhun poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Feature Co-occurrence Constraint theory proposed in this dissertation provides a means to capture the development of the language learning child's segment inventory.

The goal of this study is to systematically investigate how intonation (speech melody) is conveyed in whispered speech.

The earlier you introduce children to a language, the sooner they can be captivated by it and see that there is more than just Dutch and English. That is the basis for the language lessons for primary education that Alisa van de Haar, university lecturer of French, collaborated on. ‘Deans from different…

You've earned your degree and you’re ready to start your career. But where do you end up?

Over the past few hundreds of years, the world has changed radically. However, cultural stereotypes from the 17th century are still alive and well today, and even academic researchers sometimes use terms coined centuries ago. Why do they do that? Herman Paul, Professor of the History of the Humanities,…

They first entered the Academy Building fifty to sixty years ago. On 28 March, they were back for an afternoon: the members of the Dr Pfiffikus debating society of the German Studies programme. Former chair Hans van der Veen looks back on his student days.

This engagingly written textbook provides a unique 'hands-on' introduction to sociolinguistics, which equips readers with the tools to start their own sociolinguistic research project.

‘If it rains later, then I’ll take the car.’ In order to reason, we use sentences containing ‘if’ every single day. But how does that work exactly in the Dutch language? Alex Reuneker wrote his 628 page dissertation on the subject. Ceremony on 26 January.

This dissertation attempts to describe the linguistic history of Hittite on the basis of a systematic etymological treatment of its entire inherited lexicon, precisely analyzing the phonological and morphological developments.

This PhD project investigates the different uses of Mandarin

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Conference, Meet us in your country

Paul Christiaan Flu, originally from Surinam, was a brilliant tropical doctor, who in 1938 rose to the position of Rector Magnificus of Leiden University. The war years brought his lightning career to an abrupt end: his son was murdered and he himself was imprisoned in a concentration camp. A sad family…

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

Study information

This project aims to study the Aesopian fable from 1500 to the present day in its complex relationship between text, illustration and education, adopting a broad, transnational perspective.

Conference, Meet us in your country