LUCIS is well connected to the Dutch National Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda/NWA). Both Petra Sijpesteijn and Jan Michiel Otto have a seat in the preparatory committees of two NWA routes. Other LUCIS members are involved as well. The themes of the NWA will be an important driver in future…

Sanjar Golomov is a senior scholar at the Al-Biruni Institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In Leiden he will deliver two lectures and one masterclass for MA and PhD students as part of the Erasmus Mobility Plus project between Leiden University and the Al-Biruni Institute. The project is coordinated and…

Are you interested in ancient Egypt, the rich cultural heritage of Mesopotamia or bliblical Hebrew and Aramaic? Students of all faculties can follow electives of Ancient Near Eastern Studies without prior knowledge or special entry requirements. Archaeology student Annely Arends talks about her expe…

The state, and specifically the idea of nationality, is almost all-determining in social life in the Netherlands. It determines how people identify, how we interact with each other, and what (in)equality in society looks like. However, ultimately, the idea that we can divide people into different nationalities…

Three lecturers from Leiden University have each been awarded a €50,000 Comenius Teaching Fellows grant to implement an educational innovation project. They are Carlijn Bergwerff (Education and Child Studies), Francesco Ragazzi (Political Science) and Krista Murchison (Centre for the Arts in Society…

De Verbranders, a podcast produced by PhD candidates Neske Baerwaldt (FdR/VVI) and Wiebe Ruijtenberg (FSW/CAOS), is online! You can now listen to the first episode on Soundcloud, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Episodes of the podcast will be introduced in various courses this year.

When we think about ancient Egypt, the first things that come to mind are usually mummies and sarcophagi. According to researcher and Rijksmuseum van Oudheden curator Lara Weiss, that impression is unjustified. She made an audio tour for the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden that focuses on living Egyptians…

Experience for yourself what studying is like, or explore the city where you will be attending lectures. On Saturday 11 February, future students came to an Experience Day in The Hague. School pupils, students and parents were welcome to attend lectures and tutorials throughout the day.

How do people become involved in terrorist organisations? Liesbeth van der Heide sought the answer to this question in a Malian prison, where she interviewed terrorists in a tiny cell. She discovered that the will to survive and social context are often more decisive than individual ideological convictions.…

UNESCO has recognized a large collection of handwritten letters and the archive of Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879-1904) as documentary world heritage. Kartini opposed gender inequality in feudal Javanese society, including forced marriages, polygamy and lack of education for women.

Yousef Yousef (39), a successful entrepreneur in the water-quality industry, recently joined the Advisory Board at Leiden Law School. Read the interview about his career.

The Academic Language Centre (ATC) is one of the cornerstones of Leiden University. Director Gea Hakker explains how this organisation is providing quality (online) language courses and meeting new demands.

“United Nations peacekeeping is a proven investment in global peace, security, and prosperity. Together, let us pledge to do all we can to enable that mission to succeed”. – Secretary-General António Guterres

As a woman, working in Japan and Korea can be pretty tough, Yorum Beekman discovered. It prompted her to pursue a PhD on the subject: ‘I thought: hey, that’s interesting!’

Zār jewellery from Egypt can be found in many museums and private collections in the West, but for a long time very little was known about it, except that it was used in rituals to protect against spirit possession. PhD candidate Sigrid van Roode has explored its history and discovered that the jewellery…

International bachelor’s and master’s students started the OWL on Monday morning. During this introduction week they get to know their new university, city and each other.

Application open

Krista Murchison, University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, received a Veni grant of 250.000 euros. Her Veni-project will explore the ‘immaterial archive’ and its social and historical significance by digitally recreating manuscripts that were destroyed during World…

IAt the Criminal Justice Public Lecture on 20 April, Professor of Law and Society Maartje van der Woude spoke about her research into decisions and practice in relation to intra-Schengen border areas and the free movement of persons. The thinking behind the Schengen area is that where the external borders…

People can be easily mislead with graphs. But they don’t necessarily stay misled, the research shows.

During the past year online meetings and lectures have become a firm feature of university life. One of the highlights of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics’ online activities has been the online seminar series ‘Language policy and practices in the Global North and South’ organised by guest…

It was not until 1878 that the first female students enrolled at Leiden University, but the discussion on whether women were suited to study was by no means over. 8 March is International Women's Day. BBC correspondente Kim Ghattas will deliver a lecture on 6 March on the struggle by Arabic women for…

In the spring of 2024 the Faculty of Archaeology welcomed a new postdoc. Dita Auzina, originally from Latvia, works as a researcher in the project of Alex Geurds. ‘I have joined the project as a landscape archaeologist, but I also run my own fieldwork in Nicaragua.’

Solafa Saad (29) fled her homeland of Sudan for the Netherlands in 2016. She is now following the Leiden Preparatory Year (VGL), an initiative by Leiden University, Leiden University of Applied Sciences and the Foundation for Refugee Students (UAF) that prepares young refugees to study. ‘I regained…

In 2019 the ENIS Spring School takes place in Granada from 18 March until 22 March 2019. The Spring School will be organized by ENIS (the European Network for Islamic Studies), consisting of: CNMS (Marburg University), CSIC (Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and Escuela de Estudios…

Neither technology, nor Pan-Islamism, but only the codification of law could prevent Iran from falling even further behind the Western world. So wrote the 19th century intellectual Mustashar ad-Dowla in his tract Yak Kaleme. The translation of this work was presented in Amsterdam on 8 December.

From Persia and Arabia to North Africa: as early as the nineteenth century, there were Dutch people who used the camera themselves in various regions of the Middle East.

UNESCO has recognized an international set of fifteen manuscripts about Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe and the three Hikayat Aceh manuscripts as World Heritage. The manuscripts are inscribed in the global UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This list contains documentary heritage…

With support of several companies, including Brill Publishers, Elsevier and private foundations, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Scaliger Institute welcome around 15 to 20 Fellows and guest per year to consult and examine material in the Special Collections. The Scaliger Institute received…

Egyptologist Marleen De Meyer has been appointed the new Director of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC). Dr De Meyer has worked for the institute, which promotes Egyptian, Dutch and Flemish collaboration in the field of education and research, since 2016.

According to New York Magazine, the massive open online course (MOOC) ‘The Rooseveltian Century’ by Professor by Special Appointment Giles Scott-Smith is one of the best online courses. We asked him why you should take the course and how it came about.

Finding solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the not-inconsiderable task of the new Peace Academy in The Hague. Professor Maurits Berger and twelve students from different conflict zones are starting a creative thinking process that aims to discover the basic conditions for peace in the…

This month marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. NINO, the Language Museum, Things that Talk and the National Museum of Antiquities are seizing the opportunity to organise the first Week of Ancient Writing.

From research on stellar winds to sign language: an impressive seven researchers from Leiden University will receive a prestigious Vici grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

In less than two years’ time, Florian Volz and Timo Schmidt, both German students studying International Studies in The Hague, went from knowing each other only vaguely to sharing a small tent and a bank account. Sounds like any other ordinary relationship, right? Well, not exactly. These two honours…

One person can already make a difference, and if all students and academics were eco-friendly, the world would be a much more sustainable place. Plastic Soup Surfer Merijn Tinga opened the academic year in Leiden with this message.

Conference

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Lecture, Studium Generale

In the Pioneers of Leiden University series we talk to past and present students who were the first in their families to go to university. In this third instalment we talk to Jos Schaeken (1962) dean of the Honours Academy and Professor of Slavic and Baltic languages and Cultural History: 'I had to…

Book Presentation | Studium Generale Lecture

The people behind the Leiden University Libraries aim to maintain the level of their services to clients as much as possible. They are making thankful use of internet, but not everything can be put online.

Josephus Justus Scaliger was one of the most famous scholars of his time and yet today his name is likely to be met with blank looks. His correspondence shows that this Leiden professor was also irritable to say the least. Kasper van Ommen will defend his PhD thesis on Scaliger’s legacy on 2 July. Find…

Lecture, Research Seminar

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Lecture, Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series

Lecture