On 30 November, Florian Theissen defended the thesis 'Sincerely believing in freedom: a reconstruction and comparison of the interpretation of the freedom of religion and belief on the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights'. The doctoral…

Una Europa launches regular seed funding calls. Leiden University also often offers additional funding for projects involving Una Europa universities.

Teaching is a vital part of CompaRe’s activities. Both in Leiden and abroad, our aim is to educate the minds that will redesign and drive forward the regional integration of tomorrow. We do so by offering multiple courses on comparative regional integration in Leiden, the creation of a MOOC on comparative…

To be eligible for Archaeological Science at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

If you would like to apply for this programme, you should first check the admission requirements.

If you would like to apply for this programme, you should first check the admission requirements.

The aim of the project is to unravel the genetic and contact relations between the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and western Central America) and the Middle Andes region (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), as part of a larger endeavor to understand the historical process of the peopling of the Americas…

Expand your knowledge, gain international experience, and explore global challenges. From summer schools and online courses to virtual exchanges, Leiden University students at all levels (bachelor’s and master’s students, and PhD candidates) can participate in a range of learning opportunities.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

The unique geographic and temporal breadth of research at Leiden allows us to stimulate a shift from the classical Weberian mode of scholarly production that views historical development and modernization as emanating from Europe and the West to a multi-polar perspective that allows for more nuanced,…

Research into the evolutionary backgrounds of our diets can help us make the right choices in diet, health and lifestyle.

How did the Dutch Empire compare with other imperial enterprises? And how was it experienced by the indigenous peoples who became part of this colonial power?

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.

This project investigates diversifying and democratizing heritage through practices of “home-making”. We propose to research ‘home-making’ as a non-binary practice of combining memories of roots and routes, dwelling in the present, and desires for the future.

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Research at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies is primarily carried out under its Research Programme ‘Exploring the Frontiers of International Law’.

The Laiseang archiving project ensures the preservation of unique records of languages in the region which have been gathered by more than two dozen linguists at, and in collaboration with Dutch universities over the last 40 years.

This lecture will be hosted on Wednesday, 17 December 2025 at 6:00 pm.

What are best practices for teaching students to engage with 'wicked' problems?

The Institute of Political Science is a vibrant department with nearly 70 academic staff in Leiden and nearby The Hague.

Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past?

Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is one of the broadest of its kind, offering courses in no fewer than 80 different languages and a very broad spectrum of academic disciplines.

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 4 December 2025 at 6:00 pm.

To be eligible for MSc International Relations and Diplomacy (Advanced) at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

This programma, an initiative of the Institute for History in partnership with Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta. Aims to study more than 20 kilometers of Dutch archival materials in The Netherlands, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

On 3 December 2019, Meda Couzens defended her thesis 'The application of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by national courts'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. T. Liefaard and Prof. J.J. Sloth-Nielsen.

How do sign languages change and spread over time, and how is this influenced by their transmission history?

Caspar Reuvens, the world’s first Professor of Archaeology, was a prominent classical scholar and from his appointment in 1818 onwards Classical & Mediterranean Archaeology has been an important field of research in Leiden.

Exploring the Meanings of Lands and Forests as an Avenue for Mutual Development of People and Nature in Ghana

This focus area adresses the social context of health and well-being, with a particular emphasis on social inequality.

All research at Leiden University is organised into institutes. To do justice to the wide spectrum of research (and consequently teaching) that comes from these, you will find descriptions of all the Leiden institutes on these pages.

This PhD project investigates how grammatical features and lexical elaboration in Fulfulde Juguureere reflect aspects of cattle culture.

On the 24th of October, Nurenzia Yannuar successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Nurenzia on this achievement.

The history of sign languages of deaf people is severely understudied. The historical linguistics of sign languages offers a fundamentally new perspective on the history of human languages. This project addresses the dearth of knowledge about historical sign language linguistics through a large-scale…

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…

Lecture

Conference, 2-day Workshop

Until recently the Congo’s isolated Boa community had never read a single letter in their own language: quite simply, there was no alphabet to describe the language. A crowdfunding campaign by guest staff member Gerrit de Wit has changed that. He plans to use the rest of the money to work with a Congolese…

Lecture, China Seminar