This book looks to existential thinkers for reasons to hope immortal life could be worth living. It injects new arguments and insights into the debate about the desirability of immortality, and tackles related issues such as boredom, personal identity, technological progress, and the meaning of life…

Distance / Fiction is a sound installation that deals with the ways listening is entwined with processes and techniques of sound mediation.

Mari Nakamura defended her thesis on 14 March 2017

This thesis seeks to examine the emergence of Persian novels and short stories during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

Markus Davidsen defended his thesis on 16 October 2014

Carl Li defended his thesis on 30 June 2015

‘’These are such mind-boggling topics!’’, a student exclaims. It is May 21st, and over fifty Humanities Lab students are gathered in a Teams room. The work that they have done as honours students over the past three years culminates in this afternoon: the annual Capstone Conference, where two prizes…

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

How is tradition constructed and belief made plausible in fiction-based religion?

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

On 30 January 2024 Jurre van der Meer successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This week 'Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis' by Peter Verstraten was published by Amsterdam University Press, the sequel to Humor and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film from 2016. Each chapter in his 482-page new study begins with a title of Fons Rademakers who made films…

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Byzantine and Ottoman Archaeology, Amsterdam, 21-23 October 2011

This project aims to uncover a series of sites of difference and innovation. In particular, it locates itself in two kinds of distancing: geo-cultural (ie. in the non-European space of Japan) and medial (ie. in innovative expressive media).

Markus Altena Davidsen’s PhD dissertation is the first major study of Tolkien Religion. In it, he analyses the religion that is based on the stories by acclaimed British fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien. He also discusses how fiction itself can become religious. Davidsen will defend his dissertation on…

Prof. dr. Marieke Liem, Professor Social Resilience and Safety at ISGA, discussed the facts and fiction surrounding serial killers on Dutch NPO Radio 1.

Researchers and policymakers are welcome to attend the AI & Society Conference in The Hague on Friday 23 June. The SAILS interdisciplinary research programme will be taking a nuanced look at the state of the art of AI technology. And offering fresh perspectives.

There's a myth that people with autism avoid eye contact in conversations. This can come across as indifferent. Unjustified, stresses Jiayin Zhao, who is doing her PhD research on the socio-emotional development of children with autism. 'That people with autism don't care is anything but true.'

How do religious narratives persuade their readers to believe their message? And how can it be that some readers even come to treat fantasy and science fiction as authoritative religious texts? These are the core questions treated in Markus Davidsen’s new book Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance…

Half the world's population is introverted and comes home drained after an evening of drinks. Their social battery is empty. 'People with autism have a similar experience, but much more intense,' says Boya Li, who researches emotional regulation in children with autism and hearing impairment. Does this…

'You’ll know right away when you meet your true love’ or ‘Opposites attract’: Some persistent beliefs exist about love and attraction, but are they true? Researcher Iliana Samara investigates the dynamics of attraction and explains which love myths we can let go of.

Starting from Husserl’s somewhat controversial claim about the immortality of the constituting subjectivity, this thesis uses the limit-case of death in order to present a phenomenological exploration of the notion of subjectivity and its relationship to nature. It also offers a second-order discussion…

The aim of this thesis was to develop novel treatment strategies for different types of eye melanoma utilizing zebrafish models. We first establish orthotopic and ectopic xenograft models for uveal and conjunctival melanoma by engraftment of the immortalized cells derived from these tumors into zebrafish…

How do religious narratives persuade their readers to believe their message? And how can it be that some readers even come to treat fantasy and science fiction as authoritative religious texts? These are the core questions treated in Markus Davidsen’s new book Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance…

Neo-Baroque construction and deconstruction of the concepts of paradise in fiction.

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths?

The research project SOG Pro (Structure of Government project) studies the changes in the structure and organization of central government in four parliamentary democracies: France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and aims to explain the changes within and across each country. Why are…

How do documentary moving images and fictional narratives involve and evolve each other?

Lecture, LIAS Lunch Talk Series

This study addresses and explains the issue of negative descriptions of the Arab Other in modern Iranian thought.

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

How did digital intermediality symbolise and facilitate the transfer of content from popular culture into policy statements and vice versa in the period between 1945 and the new millenium?

When psychologists repeated a hundred studies in 2015, their results differed in two-thirds of the studies. ‘Research into research is not a luxury but a necessity,’ says Professor of Methodology and Statistics of Psychological Research Mark de Rooij. ‘My aim is to improve psychological research, to think…

Leiden University seeks to bring knowledge, academic top talents, and resources from Leiden and China together in mutually beneficial joint research projects that are content-driven, based on existing excellent research.

In this sub-project a selected number of narrative texts will be examined written in the Eurasian realm in the period 1300-1800, focusing on representations of kingship and royal authority.

The project “Digital Materials” is about the conception, exploration and analysis of possibilities to make digital processes directly operative and tangible in physical materials and examines how the fiction of these “Digital Materials” could affect on figures of interaction between human subjects and…

Religions involve belief in the unbelievable: in evil spirits causing disease, in souls surviving death, and in gods punishing wrongdoers and blessing the just. Cognitive studies suggest that humans are predisposed to speculate about fate and divine agency, but support from so-called ‘plausibility structures’…

Truth is stranger than fiction. In 1997 Juan Maldaceña discovered a remarkable dictionary that translates equation for equation the physics of black holes in string theory into the more conventional physics of quantum mechanics of interacting particles. The remarkable possibility exists that…

Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s entry in Auteur Press’s Devil's Advocate series provides a complete study of the aesthetic appeal of Roger Corman's influential first Poe picture House of Usher.

LIAS aims to advance the globally conscious vision of area studies, both within and outside the academic community. Focusing on Asia and the Middle East, the institute is a meeting place of multiple fields of inquiry, theories and methods, historical periods, and areas.

How did the slave peculium function in the socio-legal context of the Roman Empire?

Playful Time Machines: Game jamming!

Lecture, Research Seminar

PhD defence

The multidisciplinary one-year master’s programme in North American Studies provides students with comprehensive knowledge of North American history, literature, film, and culture and their connection to contemporary social, political, literary and cultural developments in an international perspecti…

Prince, Pen, and Sword offers a synoptic interpretation of rulers and elites in Eurasia from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Four core chapters zoom in on the tensions and connections at court, on the nexus between rulers and religious authority, on the status, function, and self-perceptions…