Study information

Police investigations use wiretapped phone recordings as investigative material fairly regularly. But how do they know that the voice on the recording actually belongs to the suspect? PhD student Laura Smorenburg is trying to answer that question.

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other languages.'

With the support of the Foundation for Refugee Students UAF, Russia expert Oshank Hashemi, a cum laude graduate of Leiden University, has won the Peter Baehr Prize 2016.

Three Leiden students will be sharing their knowledge of history while playing video games. The livestreams are part of the ‘Streaming the Past’ project and will be available on the popular streaming platform Twitch. The first livestream will be on Thursday 20 May.

The second and final volume of this co-authored study has just been published by J.B. Metzler. This second monograph explores the history of the concept of barbarism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Research Master in Linguistics is a specialised research-based programme offered at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). It is modelled on LUCL’s unique profile of studying language diversity by means of a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

On October 9th, Peter Alexander Kerkhof succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Peter Alexander on this great result.

Carsten de Dreu has received the Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology which is designed to recognise a mid-career scholar whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the social psychology field and brings together personality psychology and social psychology.

The specialisation in Modern Languages explores the structure, acquisition, history and use of five languages.

The scientists at Babylab Leiden ensure that important knowledge is gathered about how babies learn to understand the world around them. Meet our Babylab Team and get to know our researchers!

Sara Polak, American Studies expert and University Lecturer investigates how American presidents deal with the media and how new, social media influence our collective memory and the political game. ‘Social media algorithms influence us and our political choices in ways we do not foresee’, Polak say…

In an appeal case, an employee of a care organisation in Nijmegen who was shown the door because of her criticism about the coronavirus voiced on LinkedIn, has had her dismissal reviewed. The court in Arnhem ruled that the employee had crossed a line and that her employer was entitled to dismiss her…

PhD defence

Innovation through repetition. That is how university lecturer Jurriaan Witteman describes his research on the automatic processing of angry voices in the brain. The original research was conducted 20 years ago, but, with an NWO grant, Witteman is now going to see if those results are accurate.

The AAM-LR project aims at building a demonstrator of a web service that will help filed researchers to annotate audio- and video-recordings.

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is a reputable institute in the field of linguistics, offering excellent research and education opportunities covering a broad range of languages of the world.

Bringing together a globally representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of comparative syntax, the study of universal and variable properties of the structure of building blocks in natural language.

Lecture, Leiden-Birmingham Lectures

From 23-25 April 2014, a conference will be held on the topic of Buddhism and Social Justice. This conference confronts the common perception of Buddhism as intrinsically a tradition of peace and justice, and explores the various ways in which historically Buddhist societies of Asia have shaped, transmitted,…

Organizations often announce their protest activities prior to their implementation to mobilize awareness, recruit supporters, and receive media attention. We are interested in the effectiveness of protest announcements—that is, under what conditions governments make concessions to avoid having an announced…

Exclusion elicits the same response in children as in adolescents and adults. That is what psychologist Mara van der Meulen found when she studied brain activity in primary schoolchildren. ‘What is new for us is that it is the same in childhood as later in life.’ Doctoral defence on 10 December.

Workshop Series

Syntacticians study how words combine into larger units (phrases and sentences) in human languages and how the combinatorial possibilities determine word order and grammatical relations between parts of a sentence.

What is your preferred career path? Would you like to teach? Do you enjoy doing research? Or would you prefer a job that involves writing and editing? You will find that your Linguistics degree is a perfect preparation for the career of your choice.

If you’ve graduated from the programme and you want to further your academic education you can continue with a master’s programme. It will earn you the title of Master of Arts (MA) and significantly increase your chances of finding a position at academic level.

At LUCL we study almost all aspects of a wide range of African languages. From phonology to anthropological linguistics, from theoretical syntax to urban youth languages, we study it all.

It was already known that social anxiety disorder often affects more than one person in the same family. But research by PhD student Janna Marie Bas-Hoogendam has now shown that there are genetic brain characteristics that are associated with social anxiety. The PhD ceremony will take place on 14 Ja…

Endangered languages can survive if they are taught properly to new speakers, such as people with a migrant background. This is what Professor by Special Appointment Felix Ameka will say in his inaugural lecture on 30 September. Dutch people can do their bit by being less ‘polite’ to people whose mother…

Each year, Latin American diplomats meet the researchers and students from Leiden University who specialise in their region. This year, they visited the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. ‘The social and behavioural sciences have improved our understanding of social unrest.’

Schuurman examines how Russia is escalating its covert operations against European countries.

Terms used by literary critics in characterizing the style of novels are often impressionistic (‘baroque’, ‘austere’, ‘vivid’, ‘cerebral’ etc.). Foundations for such evaluations are usually not provided. A scientific way of studying and explaining style is lacking in present day Dutch Studies. Suzanne…

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?

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

The Centre for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce that we are searching for two PhD Candidates who will carry out research within the Centre for Digital Humanities and the Leiden Centre of Data Science.