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.

Dr. Eun-Ju Kim (LIAS/ATC) has been awarded a Comenius Teaching Fellowship 2024 from NWO. The title of her project is

Lecture

To maximise your personal development, we ensure tutorials are small-scale and staff members extremely accessible. In year one, you’ll have an average of 12 contact hours, half of which comprise lectures (in English) and the remainder tutorials (optionally Dutch or English).

Lecture

Festival

As from 1 February Adriaan Bedner is the new KITLV professor (bij special appointment) of Law and Society in Indonesia at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (VVI), Leiden University.

‘There is no such thing as a timeless Japanese soul,’ says newly appointed Professor in Modern Japan Studies Katarzyna Cwiertka. The first month of her professorship turned out to be a crucial test: Japan was hit by a destructive earthquake and tsunami, and Cwiertka had to keep her head in the midst…

With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much-needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of…

In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory.

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.

PhD candidates Mies Grijns and Hoko Horii were interviewed about their research on Child Marriage in Indonesia in the ‘Jakarta Globe’, a daily online English language newspaper in Indonesia.

Important dates in the Academic Language Centre calendar

Leiden University has a long tradition in the collaboration with Indonesia.

Language learners in higher education increasingly conduct out-of-class self-directed learning facilitated by mobile technology. This project aims to explore how university students use mobile technology for their self-directed language learning and investigate factors that influence their self-directed…

More focus on diversity in Antiquity, workshops for students with disabilities, and a card game to share stories about diversity: these and other projects will receive funding from the JEDI Fund in 2023.

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

On 7 October, a court in Athens, Greece, convicted leaders of the far-right Golden Dawn party as directing a criminal organization. Marina Terkourafi, professor of Sociolinguistics, discusses the landmark ruling for the Leiden International Studies Blog.

Legal education initiative of the Leiden University, the University of Groningen and Universitas Indonesia.

Data Science & AI student Nataliia Bagan combines a passion for mathematics, language, and artificial intelligence. Her exceptional bachelor’s thesis on improving reasoning in large language models earned her a nomination for the Leiden Science Young Talent Award 2025.

The production of history is a process of power. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where during both the colonial and the post-colonial era history has been written by hegemonic regimes. This historiography has in turn (re-)produced structures of domination, social exclusion and division.…

Festival

The MA Southeast Asian Studies at Leiden University explores Southeast Asia in-depth and from the perspective of its history, literature, media, culture, religions, philosophy or philology.

Three researchers from Leiden University have been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. The subsidy will allow the researchers to set up their own projects and put together a research team.

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other languages.'

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

Many Asian countries are in a process of democratisation. The expectation was that citizens would gradually gain more control over the functioning of their elites. Experts from Leiden have concluded that this process often fails to improve the quality of the administration. They researched the nature…

South and Southeast Asia, a region that includes India, Indonesia and seventeen other countries is one of the world’s most dynamic and diverse areas. Interested in speaking one of the region's major languages, and understanding its history, culture, and current affairs? Then this is the bachelor's programme…

In this article, the authors explore the concept of recurrent events, particularly focusing on the Eurovision Song Contest.

What languages do you speak? According to Felienne Hermans, ‘Python’ could be an answer to this question. Hermans studies how people learn to program at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University. In an article of the NewScientist she explains why programming is similar…