No less than 33 project received a Leiden Kiem grant in 2023. How did they fare? Olga Bogolyubova shares experiences from her project ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Safety and Danger in the Digital World’.

It is the end of your archaeological research project, and you may be wondering where to deposit your data. After the excavation, all of the finds are drawn, scanned, digitised, and the database is completed. Perhaps you have also accumulated a lot of data through further scientific analysis of the…

Much of the work of Serge Fehr, Professor of Quantum Information Theory, is abstract and theoretical and comprehensible to very few people. But his work helps make the digital world safer so that in future our internet banking will still be problem free, for instance. He will explain more in his inaugural…

In this article, Barrie Sander, Assistant Professor of International Law, adopts a narrative theoretical lens to examine how security is constructed, contested, and narrated within three EU regulatory frameworks at the intersection of climate and AI governance - the Critical Raw Materials Act, the AI…

In April 2025, Ms. Esther Rachow from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem presenting her ongoing doctoral research at an Austria Centre Leiden lunch-time talk. She answered a few questions about her visit below.

Multiple identities of elites and ‘commoners’ viewed through the lens of crafting from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean

Over 30.000 pages of new material have been added to the online collection of unofficial poetry publications from China in the Leiden Digital Collections. Produced outside the system, these journals and books are hugely influential yet very hard to find. To address this paradox, Leiden University Libraries…

In November 2019, Morshed Mannan participated at a conference entitled Who Owns the World? The State of Platform Cooperativism, that was hosted by The New School in New York City.

The war between Russia and Ukraine plays out not only physically but also digitally. Van Den Berg, Professor of Cybersecurity Governance at the FGGA, talked about it at several news outlets.

Workshops

Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering.

An in-depth history of Large Language Models—and what their ubiquity, disruption, and creativity mean from a wider sociopolitical perspective.

Simona Demková, Assistant professor at the Europa Institute of Leiden University, publishes her book ‘Automated Decision-Making and Effective Remedies: The New Dynamics in the Protection of EU Fundamental Rights in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’.

The Heritage Quest project is a citizen science project in which volunteers participate in archaeological research.

Through its launch of Instagram Teens, Instagram promises to create a safe environment for teenagers by introducing age restrictions. But is it actually going to improve the mental health of young people? And is the feature that allows parents to monitor their teenagers’ use of Instagram even legal?

How do you make lobbying and rhetoric both challenging and understandable for high school students? Professor Jaap de Jong found the answer in climate activist Greta Thunberg. Together with his colleague Arco Timmermans, he developed a digital guest lecture on how to present a convincing story.

What are the capabilities or limitations of traveling between islands and how does this reflect seasonal variation? Is it possible to show higher levels of connectivity between islands based on generated pathways between several sites on two separate islands?

Workshops

Study information

An international consortium of research institutes, universities and non-academic partners in six European countries has been awarded with a research grant from the Department for Research and Innovation of the European Commission in June 2018. MIDA is coordinated by the ‘Centre National de la Recherche…

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Can smart suggestions help translators work better with machine translation? As machine translation becomes the norm, professional translators are asked to correct its output; a process called post-editing. But how can we make this easier and more effective?

What is the best way for us as a society to deal with all the different forms of diversity? Professor Marlou Schrover will use the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) to explore this question with colleagues and the public.

If you have a plan that could improve the education or the learning environment of the Faculty of Humanities in terms of diversity or inclusion, you can apply for a grant from the faculty’s JEDI Fund. This year, Nasreen has been helping to develop a new syllabus for the first-year Ancient History co…

In several Mediterranean regions archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits…

What does digitalisation mean for the labour market, the business sector and society in general? Reijer Passchier, Assistant Professor Leiden Law School and Professor of Digitalisation and the Democratic Constitutional State at the Open University, spoke at a meeting of the Social and Economic Council…

The fragmentary is everywhere: we encounter fragments in social media (Tiktok, Twitter), in personal memories from our childhood, and in traditions from our cultural heritage.

Conference, Van willen naar zijn

A hidden disability can make studying a considerable challenge, partly because of the disability itself, but also because others may not realise that extra support is justified. To overcome this problem, the Faculty of Humanities is introducing the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower.

Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor of Law & Technology at eLaw, is co-author of the article 'Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) 2.0: A Manifesto of Open Challenges and Interdisciplinary Research Directions' which has been awarded the 2025 Best Paper Award by Information Fusion.

Chinese State-backed entities have taken tiny stakes in parts of two Alibaba subsidiaries that oversee a video platform and web browser. Professor Rogier Creemers argues on CNBC this move is part of a larger plan for tech regulation.

PhD defence

Karsten Lambers was interviewed by the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, where he was a post-doctoral research fellow from 2008 to 2010. Read about his career, his fascinations, and his experience with combining fieldwork with digital applications.

The goal of the MODOMA-project is to create a computer model of language acquisition.