Study of human cultures using computational approaches

Recently, Ingrid Leijten’s book Core Socio-Economic Rights and the European Court of Human Rights was published with Cambridge University Press. The monograph was published in the series Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy (edited by Laurence Gormley and Jo Shaw) and deals with the protection…

The Humanities Hub is a central location in Huizinga designed to strengthen the collaboration, connection and exchange of ideas in teaching and research on humanities in the digital world.

This case study-based textbook in multivariate analysis for advanced students in the humanities emphasizes descriptive, exploratory analyses of various types of data sets from a wide range of sub-disciplines, promoting the use of multivariate analysis and illustrating its wide applicability. Fields…

In 2021 the Leiden Osteoarchaeology Lab hosted an international workshop on methods to study past physical activity. It aimed to tackle a niche topic with the field: namely the method of studying muscle attachments to bone. Dr Sarah Schrader, one of the organisers of the workshop: ‘You can quantify…

Welcome to the Graduate School of the Faculty of Humanities.

The Leiden Human Evolution Collective (LHEC) is a network of researchers from Leiden University, LUMC, and Naturalis with an interest in human evolution. The collective brings together existing expertise in Leiden to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in research, teaching, and public outreach.

Leiden University is a unique international centre for the advanced study of languages, cultures, arts, and societies worldwide, in their historical contexts from prehistory to the present.

Studies in Human Evolution is a series of the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University and The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

The expertise at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University ranges from languages, cultures, area studies to history, philosophy, arts, and religious studies.

As part of Metamorfoze, the national digitalization project for the preservation of paper heritage, journals of The Van Vollenhoven Institute’s library have been digitized.

Conference

The Faculty of Humanities consist of various academic fields. What is the common ground of all these different academics and students? They tell their story and why it matters in today’s world in 'We are Humanities'.

It is well-known that humans have significantly transformed ecosystems since their adoption of agriculture. However, in a deeper past, prehistoric hunter-gatherers may already have altered and modified their niche in ways that had major impacts on ecosystems.

The LUMC iPSC Hotel offers the generation of research grade human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) from different tissue sources using state of the art reprogramming techniques.

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

The Thomson Reuters Journal Citation reports for 2015 are now available.In the field of law Common Market Law Review (CML Rev) is the highest ranked non-US law journal. CML Rev is also the highest ranked journal on European Law. On Google scholar, CML Rev is ranked # 1 in the top journals on European…

The Faculty of Humanities is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse community, where all students and staff are supported, respected, and empowered to do their best work, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, or socio-economic background.

Research on papyri has provided new insights into the history of the origins of Islam. Petra Sijpesteijns’s book,'Shaping a Muslim State', is based on these ancient Arabic letters and documents. Her new research on a Viennese collection of untranslated papyri is expected to produce more discoveries.

Ragazzi, ‘Suspect community or suspect category?‘, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Article by Leiden University political scientist Daniel Thomas about shifting norms for membership in international organisations.

Disciplinary History and Epistemology

This project focuses on the study of Neanderthal and early modern human behavior, primarily on the basis of stone tools, fauna and spatial patterns

This volume is themed around the interdependent relationship between humans and the environment, an important topic in the work of Corrie Bakels

S.S. Kolipaka’s thesis questions and investigates the survival prospects of reintroduced tigers and their offspring’s in the human dominated landscape of Panna tiger reserve in India.

Dr Peter Webb (LIAS) has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for his project Geo-Poetic Analysis of Pre-Islamic Arabia (GeoPo).

Lecture

It is difficult to deny the value and importance of human rights, and yet their application in the context of climate change is increasingly contested. While some argue that it is difficult to establish the violation of human rights by climate change processes, others contend that human rights are anthropocentric,…

An impact factor of 3.2 in the Web of Science journal index. And in the first 10% of Elsevier's Scopus index. The International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (IJMIR), founded at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), has become one of the most important multimedia j…

Why are the majority of our national holidays based around Christian festivities? Arabist Maurits Berger talks about this in an article on Ruetir.

Jasmina Mačkić, Assistant Professor of Human Rights Law at the Europa Institute, has published her book, Proving Discriminatory Violence at the European Court of Human Rights. This work is based on her doctoral dissertation, which she defended in May 2017 and which was funded by the Netherlands Organisation…

The Laboratory for Human Osteoarchaeology specialises in the macroscopic and microscopic analysis of human remains. We use cutting edge scientific approaches to address archaeological, historical, and anthropological research questions. In addition to paleopathological, histological, and 3D scanning…

A Humanities degree gives you a solid start on the job market. Here you can find up-to-date information about Humanities graduates on the job market, as well as alumni stories.

'When taking into account all finds in the Islamic world of this enigmatic vessel, it would perhaps be wise not to restrict this container to merely one function.'

As part of the final project for the Islam in South and Southeast Asia course (taught by Dr Verena Meyer), students were tasked with creating podcasts that delve into significant cultural and historical topics related to the region. Two students, Roma Bhiekhemsing and Shaneeva Bean, have chosen to share…

The Food Citizens? team has contributed in the special issue of the ICA journal. The semi-scientific journal of the study association Itiwana of Leiden University's Institute of Cultural Anthropology.

Leiden University and Springer launched International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval.

The editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies are proud to announce that its 23th issue is online.

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.…

This initiative is supported by the Leiden University Global Seed Fund (LUGF) 2025, awarded to Santy Kouwagam (VVI) and Irene Hadiprayitno (LIAS) together with Universitas Indonesia.

The editors of the Journal of Sonic Studies are proud to announce that its 24th issue is online.

At LUCL, researchers aim to contribute to a comprehensive and informed perspective on the human past.

At LUCL, researchers aim to contribute to a comprehensive and informed perspective on the human past.

If we want to build robots and computer systems that are not only smarter but also possess more social skills, we first need to find out more about how humans interpret information. Max van Duijn and Tessa Verhoef conduct research at the intersection of cognitive science and AI.

From the 3rd until the 8th of December, together with Dr Amr Ryad of Utrecht University our institute organized a workshop with students of the Faculty of Languages and Translation of the Azhar University. During this workshop, students had the opportunity to discuss their own research proposals with…

Professor of Machine learning Holger Hoos together with Frank Hutter, Lin Xu and Kevin Leyton-Brown won the prestigious Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ) Prominent Paper Award of this year.

The secular West is struggling with the rise of AI, but so too is Muslim Southeast Asia. What can we learn from each other?