What did colonial officials and missionaries think they were doing?

In an interview on the website of the NWO, Sabine Luning, Marjo de Theije and Esther van de Camp talk about the gold miners they met in various African and South American countries and they come to new insights.

LUCAS members are experts in the fields of literary history and theory, film and media studies, and art, architectural, and book history. Members of LUCAS teach in a wide variety of Bachelor's, Master’s, and Research Master’s Programmes.

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…

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

De plannen van het kabinet-Schoof om een langstudeerboete zorgt voor veel ophef. Promovendus Joris van de Riet schreef een opinieartikel erover voor Trouw. Zijn argument is dat een langstudeerboete desastreuze gevolgen kan hebben voor studentenverenigingen.

This project investigates how the first generation of Dutch printed books (the incunabula, 1473-1501) affected late medieval spirituality, religious practice and visual culture in the Low Countries.

Boudewijn Röell's Olympic medal, an ancient skiff and photo's of memorable rituals. Asopos de Vliet - Princess Beatrix was a member - is celebrating its 55th anniversary with an exhibition in the Oude UB, from 1 November to 26 January.

From 24 March 2021, Professor Luuk van Middelaar will deliver four public lectures on 'Geopolitical Europe: Acts and words' at the Collège de France in Paris, on the invitation of the Chairholder on International Institutional Law, Professor Samantha Besson.

A new chapter has been added to the ongoing discussion on Islamic schools in the Netherlands. Dutch television programme ‘Nieuwsuur’ and Dutch newspaper NRC conducted research into approximately 50 Islamic educational institutions which do not take part in the conventional Dutch educational system.…

Dancing in style at the University Sport Centre, and cooking together or visiting the cinema. These two initiatives for bringing Dutch and international students together were the winners of the 2016 Van Bergen Prize. The awards were presented at the annual Diversity Symposium at Leiden University on…

1000 Years of World History in 100 Old Maps.

We are pleased to invite abstracts for a conference on ‘Advancing Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights in a Polarised, Digitalised, and Unequal World’ to be held at Leiden University on 4 and 5 September 2025, in collaboration with Netherlands Network for Human Rights Researh (NNHRR).

Wereldwijd worden veel samenwerkingsverbanden met Rusland stopgezet vanwege de oorlog in Oekraïne. Hoe zit dat met de ruimtevaart, waar de Russen ook een groot aandeel in hebben?

Optimally solving real-world expensive Black-Box Optimization (BBO) problems w.r.t. real-world constraints, such as wall-clock time and computational costs, is extremely difficult and tedious.

In Dutch magazine De Psycholoog, Anne-Laura van Harmelen talks about the impact traumatic experiences, especially for those who are growing up.

The Dutch Tax Authorities leaked information about an international tax audit to Uber. In addition, they ‘obstructed and delayed’ an investigation by other EU Member States, says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) based on internal documents from the tech company.

This liber amicorum is a tribute to Prof. dr. ir. Hans H. de Iongh, associate professsor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) of Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Antwerp, on the occasion of his retirement on 27 October 2016.

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

In this opinion article published in World Development, the authors present five research and policy priorities. While it is clear that ‘pluriversal’ designs need to guide the way forward (Kothari et al 2019), defining a set of key pillars can provide direction and purpose across this pluriversality.…

Erik de Maaker and Radhika Gupta received a Seed Grant to initiate research on how heritage has been and can be mobilised to address climate change governance in Himalayan Asia. This project will address a significant knowledge gap on the potentials and pitfalls of climate governance, with an initial…

Inaugural lecture

More on the Dutch webpage.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

From ca. 1540 to 1600, thousands fled the war-stricken Southern Low Countries to the British Isles, Germany, and the Northern Low Countries. Research on this displacement crisis, central to the formation of the Netherlands and Belgium, reflects 21st-century debates on migration and language: language…

Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn teaches the masterclass terrorism 2018 together with Edwin Bakker. Read the interview here.

Since the 16th century, religious concerns have motivated the study of Old English and its speakers. In the 19th century, scholars turned to the study of Old English literature in particular to find traces of pre-Christian, ‘Germanic’ religion, as discussed in Eric G. Stanley’s seminal work The Search…

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

What workflow of non-destructive techniques provides accurate, valuable data to improve our understanding of Caribbean archaeological landscapes? How were Amerindian settlements configured?

Het Internationaal Strafhof (ICC) in Den Haag bestaat sinds 2002, met als kerntaak het vervolgen van personen die verdacht worden van genocide, misdaden tegen de menselijkheid en oorlogsmisdaden. Wat zijn we opgeschoten met bijna twintig jaar ICC? Promovenda Marieke Wierda onderzocht de impact van het…

Classical mathematical models treat space and time as a continuum, while it is sometimes more useful to regard it as granular. Hupkes is studying what this means for a number of important patterns that are often found in computer calculations and in nature.

Insect egg development in a warming world: the eco-evo-devo of embryonic developmental time: What is the genetic basis of developmental time?

In a creative assignment as a part of the bachelor's course Visual Culture, students explored the impact and complexity of visual culture by means of visual culture. The resulting artworks were of such a high quality that it was decided to present these in an exhibition.

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

In het jaar voor overlijden door zelfdoding zag een groot deel van de mensen een zorgprofessional. Het optreden van zorgprofessionals is van cruciaal belang om het aantal zelfdodingen in Nederland te verminderen. Daartoe moet de kwaliteit van zorg beter, in het bijzonder voor jongeren, jongvolwassenen…

Is the quality of the current supervision and enforcement by the government such that companies that work with large quantities of hazardous substances are brought into compliance with legislation and regulations?

Die Aufführungspraxis italienischer Instrumentalmusik in der Auseinandersetzung mit Vokalmusik und Text: Quellen und moderne Umsetzung

Why is there not just one single global law for cases of defamation in cross-border communication mediums such as the internet? Which courts are to be called on in such cases? And is it permissible to hold an intermediary instead of a content provider liable?

Political scientist Maurits de Jongh (Leiden University/Sciences Po) argues that political liberalism is self-defeating as a framework of justification for liberal conceptions of justice. He explores how the framework's self-imposed criterion of acceptability in the eyes of all reasonable citizens leads…

Nederlanders met lage inkomens lopen tot 1,5 keer meer risico op het krijgen van een hartaanval of beroerte dan rijkere landgenoten. Bij Surinaamse Hindoestanen is dit risico 1,9 keer hoger. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van het LUMC en het HagaZiekenhuis. Nederlandse artsen kijken tot nu toe niet naar deze…