How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is an independent institute within the Leiden University Humanities Faculty. A Management Team, consisting of an Academic Director, a Director of Education and an Institute Manager, is responsible for the overall running of the institute. This team is…

Education and Organisation Development

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French…

Many thanks for visiting the Master’s Open Day on Friday 15 March! We hope that you enjoyed the day and that all your questions were answered.

Linguist Marian Klamer, associated with Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, is one of the 31 scientists to receive a NWO Vici-grant for her researchproject 'Language as a time machine'.

How would you convert Egyptian hieroglyphs into Latin script? And what is actually the correct translation of dishes on a Vietnamese menu? On Saturday 28 January, high school students from all over the Netherlands will come to Leiden to ponder a series of language-related puzzles. Their goal? To win…

On Friday 22 November 2024 Ye Jiang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The staff members of the Methodology & Statistics unit are members of various boards and committees.

On the 15th of July Sawako Takemura successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

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

Saeedeh Shahnahpur defended her thesis on 13 September 2016.

On 7 September 2023 Didem Durak Akser successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Artful Mathematics: The Heritage of M. C. Escher

On Wednesday 3 September 2025 Yu Ai successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In a conversation, you provide all sorts of information to the listener. For example, you can indicate that you're certain about something, or that you heard it through someone else. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal has been awarded a Vici grant to investigate whether the way people do this is…

This project creates a comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the Sanye language, the sociolinguistic situation, and cultural practices of the Sanye (Dahalo) community in coastal Kenya.

In this dissertation, a comprehensive portrait of the American-born Quaker Lindley Murray (1745–1826) is painted and the influence of Murray’s Quakerism on his language use is investigated by analyzing a corpus of 262 of his unpublished private letters.

Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) is dedicated to ground-breaking and interdisciplinary research dealing with the relations between culture and society.

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.

What is it like to study International Studies in The Hague? Read how Vincent, student of International Studies, spends his day on average.

More than a thousand 17th- and 18th-century Dutch letters from seized ships are now available online. The letters are a gold mine for researchers wanting to study the everyday language used by men and women during this period.

One of the ways of understanding another culture better is to examine what people experience when they read a text, or look at an image. Leiden experts have a lot of knowledge in this field, for example on culture in ancient Japan.

On 9 October, Corné Smit defended his doctoral thesis, 'Minority governments in the Netherlands and Denmark '. The PhD research was supervised by Luc Verheij and Geerten Boogaard.

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

Leiden University researchers have discovered by chance a note from 1783 in Papiamento. They are working on a linguistic study on confiscated Dutch letters. The ‘Letters as loot’ project is headed by Professor Marijke van der Wal.

The LLM Advanced International Civil and Commercial Law programme (ICCL) got off to a successful start last year. As a result of the academic bonds forged between staff and students Ilya Kokorin (ICCL student 2014-15) and Jeroen van der Weide (ICCL lecturer) took part in a competition for best comparative…

In the ‘Educatips’ column, lecturers in Child and Education studies share their most important insights on teaching. This month: Tirza Smits, Kim Stroet and Marit Guda observed frustration among students working in groups, often due to poor communication. So they decided to build a tool to help.

Leiden University College welcomes researchers at all levels who wish to spend some time at our institution for a research project.

Policy studies and interventions in the field of Youth

This project aims to situate the current policy concept of ‘valorization of scientific knowledge’ in historical and epistemological perspectives. Conceptual understanding of the utility of scientific practices is developed in dialogue with historical analyses of the politics of knowledge in European…

On 1 September 2022 Afke van Ewijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Artin L-functions associated to continuous representations of the absolute Galois group G_K of a global field K capture a lot of information about G_K as well as arithmetic properties of K.

Promotor: H.W. Lenstra, Jr., Co-promotor: B. de Smit

At the age of 16, Alisa Lavrenchenko fled to the Netherlands with her mother. She is now taking a Master’s in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University. For her support of Ukrainian refugees, she has earned a nomination for the UAF Award for refugees and their professional and academic achie…

Yuchen Lian defended her thesis on AI and language evolution at Leiden University.

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. University lecturer Maria Del Carmen Parafita Couto speaks about bilingualism.

Your tuition fee depends on a number of factors, such as your nationality and your previous Dutch higher-education qualifications.

Poster session

Peter Rodrigues, Professor Emeritus of Immigration and board member of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, recently dealt with a fascinating case in which a woman with Russian nationality felt she had suffered discrimination.

Anke Smits and Lucien van Beek have been awarded a Praesidium Libertatis Grant this year. Smits is an assistant professor at the LUMC and Van Beek at the Faculty of Humanities. They each receive a sum of 75,000 euros from the Leiden University Fund (LUF).

What does life look like after International Studies? For Chris Colijn who graduated in 2018, it involves working on his master’s in Russian and Eurasian Studies, in combination with a bustling traineeship for “Raam of Rusland”, a think tank, focusing on Russian and Ukrainian politics, economy and culture.…