This year marks the 450th anniversary of the Capture of Brielle by the Watergeuzen (lit. ‘Sea Beggars’) and therefore the birth of the Netherlands. Student Johan Visser is contributing to no fewer than three books about the extraordinary year of 1572.

What does the retail crisis mean for the future of Europe's urban centres? Assistant professor Alistair Kefford answers this very question in the French television programme 27.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded a grant of 750,000 euros to the 'Visualising the Unknown in 17th-century Science and Society' project. Researchers will reconstruct how seventeenth-century scientists recorded and shared their groundbreaking microscopic discoveries. We…

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

Lecture

Seventeenth-century Danish scientist Niels Stensen made groundbreaking discoveries in the anatomy of the body and of Earth. This Leiden alumnus’s theories are still relevant, as an exhibition at the Oude UB shows.

82 years ago Queen Wilhelmina fled to England. Henk te Velde tells about her on the Australian radio show 'Nightlife'.

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

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.

Debates about the ‘end’ of the Roman era, how, when, and even if it ended, are still very much alive and raging. However, what happened after the (long) late antique period is a lesser-known and lesser-studied subject. The post-Roman past needs, however, as much energetic investigation and discussion.…

Assistant professor Stephanie Noach has won the Dissertation Prize of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation. She is receiving this prestigious prize for her research on darkness in contemporary art from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Banquets for the rich, porridge for the poor and a standard diet of bread, olive oil and wine. Just a few assumptions about the Roman diet.

Lecture, CHEI Seminar - Book launch

High demand at emergency departments is not a reliable indicator of the number of patients that will be sent to the Acute Admissions Unit. The LUMC has therefore developed an admissions predictor.

Nicky Boer is enrolled in the Educational Master’s Programme in Social Studies/Social Sciences at ICLON, the Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching.

It is one of the most personal and simultaneously most universal experiences of human life: caring for a young child. Professor Sarah Cramsey has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate how factors such as nationality, political systems, and religion influence the first thousand days after…

Lack of manliness, avaricious or too imaginative. These are just a few of the accusations with which British scientists discredited each other over a hundred years ago. PhD candidate Léjon Saarloos researched British scientists around the year 1900 and their idea of what makes a good - and therefore…

More than 40 years ago, a wrecked merchant ship was found in the Wadden Sea. PhD student Geke Burger looked at this archaeological find from a historical perspective.

The Leiden municipality wants to make the city centre climate-proof and combat heat stress by greening it. But they want to do this in a way that does justice to the city’s heritage. Researcher Fenna IJtsma delves into historical greenery to offer inspiration.

Over the course of the 20th century, politicians increasingly came to rely on experts. Their language was peppered with terms like ‘policy pathways’ and ‘evaluation frameworks’. This made debates more abstract and less ideological.

GIFs, memes and videos: anyone who opens a social media platform can be in no doubt that today we live in a visual culture. But the role of images in social communications isn’t new, says Associate Professor Marika Keblusek. She has been awarded a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Open Competition (Large)…

The touring exhibition 'Presenting with the city' has touched down in the Lipsius Building. In the presentation, students and researchers show how their research has contributed to the city.

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

The 50th Top 450 entry has now been published. In the run-up to the university’s 450th anniversary, we are compiling our Top 450. What is your favourite?

Geert-Jan Janse has always been fascinated by the way objects can bring the past closer. On 16 November, he will present a Museum Talk about his work as the director of the Vereniging Rembrandt (Rembrandt Association).

When discussing the history of Islam, the focus is almost always on the history of the Sunni majority. University Lecturer in the history of Islam, Edmund Hayes wants this to change. His new ERC-funded project , focuses on the development of the early Shia community.

What do the cloth trade and slavery have to do with each other? Quite a lot, as it turns out, as by history student Sjoerd Ramackers demonstrated in his bachelor’s thesis. He reveals that cloth merchant Daniel van Eijs was closely associated with four plantations in Berbice, a former Dutch colony on…

Historians recently started preliminary research on Leiden University’s role in colonialism and historical slavery. Our knowledge about this is too limited and fragmented. They are looking with fresh eyes at Leiden’s archives and collections. An interview with historians Alicia Schrikker and Ligia G…

Lecture and Exhibition

Arts and culture

Lecture

The opening of the new academic year highlighted students' and lecturers' personal motivators. Incoming students were encouraged to be bold, forge their own paths and grow by trial and error.

Are you still not sure what direction you want to take within the field of law? Would you like to hear more about career opportunities and meet professionals in an informal setting? Or do you have specific questions for one of our alumni?

Film screening and Book Launch

In the Spanish town of Guadalajara, there is a street named ‘Burgemeester Fluiterstraat’, named after a descendant of Leiden migrants who had done well in the South. He was not the only Guadalajara resident with Leiden roots: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a stream of Dutch textile workers…

For a long time, even many researchers thought that guide dogs were a relatively modern invention. An accidental encounter with archival material showed university lecturer Krista Milne that guide dogs helped their blind owners as far back as the Middle Ages. Milne now has received an NWO XS grant to…