Stars like the sun are born in large molecular clouds existing from gas and dust. During the formation process, the chemical composition of the material can be altered drastically by the changing physical conditions.

Marine sponges are important members of reef ecosystems, as they play ecological roles that are essential for the health of the reef.

Considering Mesoamerican Precolonial books as material objects

How can we best tell the current generations about some of the darkest parts of our past? To answer this question, researchers from Leiden are working with the Gedeeld Verleden, Gezamenlijke Toekomst foundation on public programmes about the Dutch history of slavery.

'Writing is not science, but art,' Lucas van Osenbruggen says. Last semester, he attended the Honours Class 'Creative Writing'. Together with his teacher Pauline Slot, he looks back on a course that is 'really different'.

The curators and conservator share fascinating stories about physical objects from the Special Collections through regular blog posts.

Max van Duijn, Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), has been awarded a Veni grant for his research into children's empathy. The ability to empathise can be studied by telling stories. This process, known as 'Theory of Mind' or ‘mindreading’, can provide important…

The Leiden Academic Course Center offers various writing courses. Make your own reality when writing stories. You learn what a "good idea" is for a story or novel. You learn how to develop story lines and characters and how to develop your own style. At this moment we offer one writing course in English…

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

Man is nature's mind-reading champion: we are better able than any other living beings to empathise with others. This comes in part from our story-telling culture, according to Max van Duijn. PhD defence 20 April.

This dissertation gives an ethnographic account of Kurdish dengbêj narrative from a theorethical perspective.

Presenting requires empathy, knowing the essence of your story and being able to put it into words. And, of course, a healthy dose of self-awareness and self-confidence. This forms the base for the presentation-training course for young researchers organized by the Centre for Professional Learning.…

Kartika Setyawati defended her thesis on 12 November 2015

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes; World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting.

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

What is the name of the medieval Persian poet Nezami (✞ ca. 1209) doing on the cover of an Eric Clapton rock album? Asghar Seyed Gohrab, associate professor at the Institute for Area Studies, talks about it in a new blog for the Leiden Medievalists Blog.

An archaeologist as a modern-day shaman. An unexpected comparison Professor by Special Appointment of Public Archaeology Luc Amkreutz will make in his inaugural lecture.

Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco

Books, prints or photographs, they exist to be read or viewed. But they are so much more.

During a closing exhibition, participants of the Master Honours Class 'Leiden: City of Refugees?' present their invitation to an imaginary group of 'others'. By combining science with art, students learn to look at society in a different manner.

For ten months, PhD student Sanne Rotmeijer worked on the editorial boards of various news media on Curaçao and Sint Maarten. She also tracked how news goes around on the streets and circulates on social media. The aim? To find out how stories became 'the news'.

The National-Socialist Movement in the Netherlands - the NSB - remained the only legal party in the Netherlands during most of the Second World War.

In Uprooting the Diaspora, Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain support amongst Jewish…

A story of Two Mosuls, The Resurrection of the Iraqi Armed Forces and the military defeat of ISIS. In this article, published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, the authors Maarten Broekhof, Martijn Kitzen and Frans Osinga discuss the military adaptation by the Iraqi armed forces and their role in…

If an algorithm has to learn to understand language, simply having a lot of data doesn’t help much. Like us, a computer has to learn the language in interaction with others. Tessa Verhoef is fascinated by how this interaction works.

Would you like to do collection-oriented research, but do not have sufficient resources? Every year, the Museums, Collections and Society (MCS) research group makes several research scholarships available for this purpose. Researchers Elizabeth den Hartog and Marika Keblusek previously received an MCS…

Laura van Broekhoven always knew she wanted to study archaeology, and that’s exactly what she did. Now this Leiden alumna is director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the four museums of the University of Oxford.

For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, women students and researchers from physics talk about what inspires them about their work. From quantum to cosmology and biophysics, their curiosity about how nature works is what connects these women. What do these 5 scientists want to share…

This film will be screened on Sunday, 19 May 2024 at 7 pm.

Fundamental research teaches us how our brain decides to eat one more sweet, instead of doing exercise. A public information campaign about healthy lifestyle has little impact on the decision, as Professor of General Psychology Bernard Hommel is aware. However, he does know what works. But the question…

As long as we humans have existed, we have told each other stories. But how does a story change each time it is told? Which elements stick and which ones are forgotten? This is what Max van Duijn and Tessa Verhoef will research in their Lowlands Whispers experiment at Lowlands Festival.

This subproject examines the development of memory cultures, the meaning of memories of the Dutch Revolt, the multimedia aspect of the creation of a local memory culture, which artefacts were used to keep memories alive and the differences between local memory cultures in the Repubilc and the Southern…

One often sees gloomy Dutch newspaper headlines about pupils’ arithmetic skills in elementary schools. But is the situation really so bad? Marian Hickendorff is conducting intricate research on performance in and the teaching of arithmetic. The conclusions she draws beg to differ.

LUC is located in The Hague and offers a three-year English Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a focus on today's Global Challenges: Peace & Justice, Sustainability, Prosperity and Diversity.

It might seem a bit early to be considering this, but what will you do after completing your programme? At Leiden University we ensure that all our students are well prepared for the job market, and we’ll do our utmost to help you get your career off to a flying start.

Anyone can tell a story. That is the guiding principle Hans Dekker, Senior programme leader at the Centre for Professional Learning (CPL), and his colleague Suzanne Verhees use to kick off their multi-day Storytellling course. Arjan van Unen participated in the course over the summer and learned how…

He studied Dutch Studies, did Dutch literature research for his internship, and worked at HEMA: Hungarian Márton Biró (26) came to the Netherlands on exchange and decided to stay.

For Sybille Lammes, professor of New Media and Digital Culture, corona offers a whole new perspective on her research into play. Digital media may have never been more important now that we're working remotely, but we have also started to game more because we are spending more time indoors. Lammes can…

111 years ago, Heike Kamerlingh Onnis liquified helium for the first time, a tour the force that netted him the Nobel prize. It took a laboratory of a size rarely seen. Now, ultracold helium has become a commodity for physics research. In Wolfgang Löffler's lab, it is ready at hand thanks to a coffee…

Newsweek has published a story on Leiden Alzheimer research led by physicist Lucia Bossoni.

Conducting experiments next to the huge speakers of the Alpha Stage at Lowlands. This was reality for researchers Max van Duijn and Tessa Verhoef, and they were loving it. 'Yesterday evening we were completely covered in mud.'

Mazatec chants and ancient Mesoamerican pictography

To address the relevance of Christianity to the ideological negotiations with the officially established authority, this research will be conducted by asking how the history enthusiasts negotiate the Christianity-related ideology through reconstructing the Christian past and reproducing religious histories…

It was a remarkable trend in 19th-century London: middle-class bourgeois bohemians falling in love with anarchism and its assassins. University lecturer Michael Newton has been awarded a NIAS subsidy to reconstruct the lives of three of these families.

Roderick Geerts, a PhD candidate of the Faculty of Archaeology in Leiden, takes us on a short journey through the rich history of the Red Sea port of Berenike in Egypt.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. Professor of African Linguistics Maarten Mous explains the importance of hearing your language at school.