On this page, you can find video's explaining the research of LUCAS members.

Major renovations, much-discussed exhibitions and current museum related questions. ‘If you want to know what is happening in the art and museum sector in a very up-to-date way, then the 'Museum Talks' lecture series is the thing for you’, says Professor of Art History and organiser Stijn Bussels.

A cannon, a sabre, guns: these Sri Lankan objects had been in the Rijksmuseum for centuries. In early December, they were returned to Sri Lanka. Associate Professor of Colonial History Alicia Schrikker led the research that formed the basis for the restitution and published a volume on the findings…

For the eleventh time in a row, Leiden University’s unique liberal arts and sciences programme has been awarded the ‘Top Rated Programme’ quality seal by Keuzegids universiteiten 2024.

In Renaissance Florence, humanists wrote Latin poems fashioning their city as the new Rome, and members of the Medici family as Roman rulers. How can we explain this practice?

Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan’s Black Desert (200 BC to 800 AD)

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

In 2025 hebben medewerkers en studenten van de Universiteit Leiden veel mooie prijzen ontvangen en belangrijke onderzoekssubsidies binnengehaald.

On June 14th, Jeroen Duindam, Professor of History at the Faculty of Humanities, was awarded an exceptionally high distinction for his achievements in the field of Austrian history.

Archaeologist Frans Theuws, Buddhism specialist Jonathan Silk and mathematician Ronald Cramer have each been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euros.

Berber languages have long been banned from public life in North Africa, but the situation has changed drastically. Linguistic research is generating new insights on the distant past and on present-day Dutch Moroccans. This is the finding of Maarten Kossmann, the only professor of Berber Studies in…

How do you study complex disasters like a nuclear explosion or a natural disaster? Who can help unravel the legal knot that Brexit has become? The important societal themes of the present day call for interdisciplinary collaboration. Leiden scientists pitched their research at a symposium at Leiden…

What lessons can public leaders draw from crisis management? In the second Leiden Leadership Lunch in our series on ‘Leadership opportunities in times of crisis’ Dr. Jaap van Lakerveld and Dr. Jeroen Wolbers – experts in the field of crisis management – shared their insights from the recently published…

How do we define the works of a film director whose films cross many established boundaries at once?

Perec’s Lieux project consists of texts describing the author's places of memory, photographs, personal documents and ephemera collected in the street.

Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s entry in Auteur Press’s Devil's Advocate series provides a complete study of the aesthetic appeal of Roger Corman's influential first Poe picture House of Usher.

Studies over tien eeuwen leescultuur

Lexicographical description of Greek; production of Greek-Dutch dictionary

How did the life course, with all its biological, social and cultural aspects, influence the lives, writings, and art of the inhabitants of early medieval England?

This book presents a thorough analysis of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s memory culture, focusing particularly on commemorations and representations of the Anfal and Halabja atrocities.

This week 'Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis' by Peter Verstraten was published by Amsterdam University Press, the sequel to Humor and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film from 2016. Each chapter in his 482-page new study begins with a title of Fons Rademakers who made films…

The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images

This project aims to study the Aesopian fable from 1500 to the present day in its complex relationship between text, illustration and education, adopting a broad, transnational perspective.

Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins.

Representations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age?

Check back regularly on this page for research opportunities of interest to Humanities staff and students employing digital tools and methodology.

Today, everybody and everything produces data. People produce large amounts of data in social networks and in commercial transactions. Medical, corporate, and government databases continue to grow. Sensors continue to get cheaper and are increasingly connected, creating an Internet of Things, and generating…

This special issue of Politique européenne 2019/4 (N° 66) contains, among others, a contribution by Astrid Van Weyenberg.

In Film and Video Intermediality, Janna Houwen innovatively rewrites the concept of medium specificity in order to answer the questions “what is meant by video?” and “what is meant by film?”

This book aims to understand cultural transitions and negotiations between art and politics from 1989 to 2020 through analysis of a series of Cuban novels.

This is the first comprehensive commentary on a section of Xenophon's Anabasis in English for almost a century.

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths?

This project looks at the Ancient Greek language from the perspective of the ordinary writer. A large corpus of more than 60.000 Greek texts on papyrus, from private letters to petitions and contracts, offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-literary writers in…

Despite the fact that transnational movement and intercultural encounter are the signs of our present time, questions of belonging and legitimation of citizenship in most West-European countries still largely depend on monolingual norms and the problematic conflation of the idea of a national language…

In the globalised world of today, traditional definitions of national Self and national Other no longer hold. The unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies demands a thorough rethinking of national boundaries on several levels.

Rosemary's Baby is one of the greatest movies of the late 1960s and one of the best of all horror movies, an outstanding modern Gothic tale. An art-house fable and an elegant popular entertainment, it finds its home on the cusp between a cinema of sentiment and one of sensation.

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities…

Show People offers a comprehensive history of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

PhD defence

Twenty-two year old student of Leiden University College The Hague, Sara Kemppainen on her role as European Union Delegate at the G(irls)20 Summit, founder of WIL, UWC Alumni, Summit Coordinator and Bachelor student committed to bringing human welfare to the center of tech policy.

PhDArts candidate Ruchama Noorda will graduate on Wednesday 9 December 2015

A delegation from Leiden University will be visiting Mexico from 21 to 25 October. The visit aims to strengthen the ties between Mexican universities and Leiden University.

PhD candidate Manon Wintgens is using an algorithm to trawl through thousands of international tax treaties. She hopes to detect a system in the dizzying interplay between countries, businesses and documents. It is a unique research project.

By making smart use of available data, the health and care of people can be substantially improved. Marco Spruit wants to use language and machine learning in the coming years to identify and solve the biggest care issues in the region of The Hague. He has been appointed Professor of Advanced Data Science…

The government is investing 646 million euros and has set aside a further 3.5 billion to drive economic growth in the Netherlands. Much of the National Growth Fund will be used for scientific innovations. Leiden University is involved in three of the projects.