Important dates in the Academic Language Centre calendar

In November 2013, Prof.Dr. L. Jan Slikkerveer, Director of the LEAD Programme was personally invited by the former President of Indonesia, Dr. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to present a lecture on The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowldege in Sustainable Development in Indonesia in the World Culture Forum…

Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721) produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations – idealized images that conceal the violence of colonialism.

On 7 October, a court in Athens, Greece, convicted leaders of the far-right Golden Dawn party as directing a criminal organization. Marina Terkourafi, professor of Sociolinguistics, discusses the landmark ruling for the Leiden International Studies Blog.

Different groups can have different memories of the same historical event. This can lead to conflict but does not have to. How is this, and how can countries and people reconcile with the past?

Three researchers from Leiden University have been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. The subsidy will allow the researchers to set up their own projects and put together a research team.

Festival

In this article, the authors explore the concept of recurrent events, particularly focusing on the Eurovision Song Contest.

In September, the Una Europa ELSEA project, Enhancing Scholarship in Eastern Africa, officially started. Now that the project has been running for a couple of months, it’s high time to check in and see how the project is going.

From gay rights in Asia to water management in the Philippines and from the Silk Road to current tensions with North Korea. Come to the Tour of Asia on 14 September to find out all you wanted to know about Asia and more.

How do local, non-institutional ideas about end-of-life care influence professional palliative care and vice versa? These questions will be answered by medical anthropologists Annemarie Samuels and Natashe Lemos Dekker in the coming years.

This book by Dirk Jacob Jansen traces the career of Jacopo Strada (Mantua 1515-Vienna 1588), examining his role at court in Vienna, where he served as Imperial architect and antiquary. Strada’s career was unusually wide in scope and cosmopolitan in outlook even for a Renaissance artist.

In a well-filled Telders Auditorium, university learners of Korean competed with each other to see who speaks Korean the best.

In the Netherlands, as elsewhere in the world, many patients who are in a palliative care trajectory prefer not to receive full or explicit medical information. This is more often the case for patients with ethnic or cultural minority backgrounds. As open-information provision is the norm, non-disclosure…

Throughout the coming year, all attention in Leiden will be on Asia. This special year, featuring numerous Asian events, conferences, exhibitions and concerts, celebrates the new Asian Library at Leiden University. Come and read, watch, listen, taste or dance Bollywood style.

Alumni event

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.'

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

Debate, LUCL Fireside Chat

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

What languages do you speak? According to Felienne Hermans, ‘Python’ could be an answer to this question. Hermans studies how people learn to program at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University. In an article of the NewScientist she explains why programming is similar…

Communication is the transmission of information. All day long we are busy explaining and making things clear to each other, but exactly how we do that varies from language to language. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal delved into African Bantu languages for a Vidi project.

Festival

Prof. dr. Marcel Cobussen will take part in a research network project in London.

From 17 to 19 September, the University of Granada organized the 27th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM).

After having been cancelled in 2020, this year the Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is going online. From 12 – 23 July, language and linguistics enthusiasts from all over the world can once again learn about a variety of rare languages and linguistics topics. Director Sasha Lubotsky tells…

Lucien van Beek studied Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, focusing on Ancient Greek. As of February 2015, Van Beek will be project manager at Ineke Sluiter’s Greek-Dutch dictionary project.

In tracing intra-site, local and regional craft networks in Late Bronze Age Tiryns (Greece) the project aimed to understand technological changes, (dis)continuities and social practices from the Late Palatial until the Post Palatial periods in Mycenaean Greece.

What did colonial officials and missionaries think they were doing?

Author and political scientist Mounir Samuel has spent recent years delving into the many ways that language can exclude people and bring them together.

PhD defence

In the South and Southeast Asian Studies programme, you will gain a strong foundation in academic, language, and critical thinking skills essential to understanding the history, culture, and modern context of this dynamic and increasingly important region.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most influential interdisciplinary scientific conferences in the world. Held annually, it serves as a global forum for presenting new research, discussing pressing societal challenges, and fostering collaboration…

Festival

The fourth edition of the Middle Eastern Culture market was a great success with more than 2000 visitors over the weekend. Attendees participated in the many workshops, attended lectures, and shopped at the market stands.

Leiden University has a long tradition of Asian language education. Chinese, Japanese and Korean partners are essential in providing a practical side of learning education.