On Things That Talk, a website founded and developed by Fresco Sam-Sin, students and researchers describe objects from today and from long ago. By now, more than a hundred objects have been covered. Willemijn Waal, Emma Verweij and Frank van den Boom contributed to the content.

In its session of 15 April 2024, the Austrian Academy of Sciences elected professor Petra Sijpesteijn as one of its new Corresponding Members.

Research on papyri has provided new insights into the history of the origins of Islam. Petra Sijpesteijns’s book,'Shaping a Muslim State', is based on these ancient Arabic letters and documents. Her new research on a Viennese collection of untranslated papyri is expected to produce more discoveries.

Andrea Cortellari, a 2020 graduate of the MA program in Middle Eastern Studies at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, wins the best MA thesis prize by the Society for Turkic, Ottoman, and Turkish Studies.

On February 1st 2016 the first Rabat semester at the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) has started. During the semester, organised for students of Arabic (Middle-Eastern Studies), participants will study Modern Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Moroccan culture and society, Berber languages and…

The book on Turkey. A Modern History written by Professor Erik-Jan Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, is now available in nine different languages. Arabic and Polish versions have now been published.

Get the most out of your studies at Leiden University by taking part in our extracurricular activities.

The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA Literary Studies but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the relevant specialization…

How can we explain the popularity of the Spanish comedia nueva in the seventeenth-century theatre scene of the Low Countries?

Late Antiquity is characterized by migration movements, political unrest and religious strife. The way we assess these religious conflicts is often coloured by a post-Reformation understanding of ‘religion’. In my research, I show that late ancient authors understood religion in a way that differs much…

Hanan Hammad and Eftychia Mylona give a master class focusing on conceptual and methodological challenges in writing histories of marginalized social groups.

In the master’s programme in Dutch Discourse Studies at Leiden University you will study rhetoric and argumentation, and you will specifically focus on research into pragmatics, stylistics, genre research and persuasion.

As from Wednesday 13 May, the Faculty Office has moved to the Herta Mohr Building.

In both the autumn and the spring semesters, full bachelor’s programmes worth 30 ECTS are offered. Besides these study programmes, NIMAR provides an honours track for bachelor’s students from various disciplinary backgrounds and contributes to study trips to Rabat.

This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Wadad Kadi, of the University of Chicago, to Leiden. She is the first Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University.

The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) has appointed four Leiden professors as members. Petra Sijpesteijn, Vanessa Mak, Mariska Kret and Miranda van Eck have recently joined the KHMW.

This study delivers a comprehensive picture of the causes of radicalization in the Eastern and Southeastern regions of Turkey. It demonstrates how regionally specific factors enable ideologically disparate terrorist groups to recruit and radicalize from the same population.

On the 2nd of July, Axel Palmér successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Axel on this achievement!

On the 17th of September, Jermy Balukh successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jermy on this achievement!

Together with Knud Andresen, Bart van der Steen recently published a volume titled A European Youth Revolt. European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s.

On December 5th, Matthias Pache succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthias on this great result.

During the project, this page will be updated with various written and audiovisual research outputs.

This book examines how gender relations were regulated in ancient Near Eastern and biblical law. The textual corpus examined includes the various pertinent law collections, royal decrees and instructions from Mesopotamia and Hatti, and the three biblical legal collections. The book explores issues beginning…

Between 1993 and 2000 the Faculty of Archaeology had a formal cooperation with the Service Régional de l’Archéologie de la Guadeloupe, Direction Regional des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC) and the then director André Delpuech. During that period surveys and excavations were carried out at a number of s…

Leiden University offers students a rich environment in which to reach their potential.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

This project investigates which metaphors are problematic in machine translation, when, why, and for whom.

This project aims to answer the following questions: how did the landscape and geography of the local surroundings of Chalcis impact medieval to early modern productivity, habitation, mobility and interaction in a wider sense? And where are such changes and continuations still visible in the landsca…

Who doesn't love to turn on a horror film on a rainy evening? Fortunately, it is only fiction - or is it? According to university lecturer Evert Jan van Leeuwen, modern horror says more about our society than we think. He has been nominated for the Klokhuis Science Prize for his research into addiction…

New Approaches to Understanding the Eastern Mediterranean during Byzantine and Ottoman Times

Tracking early human behaviour through plant processing and -exploitation.

Three programmes at the Faculty of Humanities have been awarded medals by EW and ResearchNed. The bachelor’s in German Language and Culture took gold, and the bachelor's in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and the master's in Middle Eastern Studies each earned a bronze medal.

Two open letters are currently circulating among civil servants in the Netherlands calling for the Dutch government to take a different stance towards Israel. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law in Leiden, says in a national radio broadcast that this is an unusual and unique…

Two researchers at the Faculty of Archaeology have received a Veni award from the Netherlands Organisation for Academic Research (NWO). This award offers promising young researchers the opportunity to further develop their ideas for a period of three years.

For my Policy in Practice research project, Elise van Dansik engaged with a problem that Leiden ‘Social Domain’ policy officers saw themselves confronted with, which was why migrant organizations of Slaaghwijk (a socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Leiden’s north) do not cooperate with…

Rafaëlle Kwakkel is currently studying Literary Studies: Literature in Society. In addition to her studies, she works at Studium Generale and enjoys being creative.

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas.

The mission of Thamyris/Intersecting is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue and confrontations between them.

The purpose of LENS is to foster, coordinate and support research of visual media of analog and digital photography, film, and video, and the visual arts.

This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Haunted Europe offers a comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK’s relationship to mainland…

This Festschrift in honour of Cary J. Martin

Beauty is a central concept in the Italian cultural imagination throughout its history and in virtually all its manifestations. It particularly permeates the domains that have governed the construction of Italian identity: literature and language.

The Tragedy Of The Stupid Nation retraces three decades of political instability during which the people of the Central African Republic suffered from several waves of violence that led to the breakdown of the social cohesion between the different communities (first along ethnic, then along religious…