This book published by Oxford University Press discusses religion and trade in world history.

The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Culture Versus the Rise of Modern Art (1860-1915)

Many students dread writing a thesis. Master’s student Laura Robustella's practice-based thesis shows that it is well worth the effort. She developed an art exhibition based on her master’s thesis.

On 15 April 1942, members of the Dutch military police on Curaçao shot and killed fifteen Chinese Shell workers. Assistant Professor Vincent Chang has been awarded an NWO XS grant to investigate how this happened and why these Chinese seamen are now being commemorated again after decades of being fo…

Historical Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society in its historical dimension. This is the first textbook to introduce this vibrant field, based on examples and case studies taken from a variety of languages.

This project investigates (1) how the strategies used in expressing epistemicity differ in their interpretation and use; (2) which strategies can combine and to what effects this leads; (3) what the expression of (various aspects of) epistemicity tell us about how the languages encode the speaker’s…

This project investigates how people choose linguistic forms like questions or statements in everyday speech.

There is an urgent need for more physiologically relevant cell culture methods to guide compound selection in pre-clinical stages of the drug development pipeline.

This open access book investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy.

What is the effect of a dynamic training in children’s inductive reasoning skills and how is it related to children’s school performances and language development.

In this thesis,

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

Aafje de Roest turned her hobby into her job. She went from a teenager who enjoyed listening to hip hop music to a PhD candidate who focuses on how Dutch hip hop music shapes the cultural identity of young people in the Netherlands.

This thesis investigates the grammar of Gaahmg, a Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic language spoken in the Blue Nile Province of North Sudan. The comprehensive description provides an analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ten texts of various genre are given to help illustrated the grammar…

A new publication that brings together perspectives on language contact phenomena across temporal and spatial dimensions.

We are pleased to invite abstracts for a conference on ‘Advancing Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights in a Polarised, Digitalised, and Unequal World’ to be held at Leiden University on 4 and 5 September 2025, in collaboration with Netherlands Network for Human Rights Researh (NNHRR).

In this dissertation, Dutch secondary school teachers’ attitudes, knowledge, noticing skills and reasoned practices regarding culturally responsive teaching in a multicultural classroom context, were examined.

This research examines cultural pathways as a tool, methodology and framework for advancing climate action in the Anglophone Caribbean through the integration of archaeological, ethnographic, and community-based knowledge.

Leiden Asia Departments

How are night spaces imagined, produced, experienced and narrated by migrant communities in Europe? This research project considers this question in eight European cities: Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cork, Galway, Lisbon, London, Rotterdam. Authorities have historically wrestled with the issue of night-time…

This book explores intercultural management challenges in sub-Saharan Africa through a case study of Vasco Silva, a Portuguese businessman in Luanda, Angola.

Dlshad Marf defended his thesis on 4 July 2016

What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they invoke early modern vices? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century?

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

The general aim of the project is a description and analysis of the Leiden anatomical collections from a humanities perspective. The project investigates how historical and cultural practices and concerns have shaped anatomical preparations and how exhibitions of the anatomical body have informed cultural…

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

What do ten-year-old children and chatbots have in common? PhD researcher Bram van Dijk studied language development in both children and AI language models. ‘It’s actually quite practical that we attribute human traits to a chatbot.’

Intensive 5-day programme on the world-famous Antwerp-based printing and publishing house founded by Christopher Plantin in 1555. International experts will discuss how it developed the production and distribution of religious books and related illustrations and prints in the following centuries.

Leiden University offers ambitious students a world-class environment in which to reach their full potential.

In the South and Southeast Asian Studies programme, you will gain a strong foundation in academic, language, and critical thinking skills essential to understanding the history, culture, and modern context of this dynamic and increasingly important region.

On 28 and 29 May, Carlotta Rigotti, postdoctoral researcher at eLaw, held a workshop on fairness and diversity bias in AI-driven recruitment at the annual symposium of the Japanese Society on Artificial Intelligence (JSAI) in Hamamatsu, Japan. The workshop was organised as part of the BIAS project in…

This project combines and reconsiders all the available evidence of the Scheurrak SO1, and use new archival databases and modern archaeological techniques to shed new light on the material culture of the Baltic grain trade and the Holland shipbuilding industry at the turn of the sixteenth century.

This PhD project investigates how language models can be used to extract structured knowledge from text in a way that is accurate, robust, and applicable to real-world use cases.

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

Our team is committed to the study of knowledge in its broadest sense, encompassing both ideas and practices in all its historical variety. We look at what people regarded as knowledge, how they created, collected, circulated and used it, also why it mattered to them, and how all this was embedded in…

Nietzsche says

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

Carsten Stahn has just published Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities and Access to Culture. The book is part of the OUP Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Series.