Haunted Europe offers a comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK’s relationship to mainland…

The ‘empathic mind’ in children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI); what can children with SLI understand of other people’s minds and emotions?

Festival

Linguist Wataru Uegaki received an NWO Grant of 58400 Euro for his research project 'In search of semantic universals in the modal domain'. With this money Wataru can compile a database and organise workshops. An interview with Wataru:

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 dissertation examines whether a cochlear implant provides congenitally deaf born children with sufficient auditory input to acquire low salient and syntactically and semantically complex functional items such as personal pronouns compared to their hearing peers.

Marleen Hogendoorn (36) studied Dutch Language and Culture at Leiden University and is now editor-in-chief of the feminist monthly OPZIJ.

Our East Asia experts work across various disciplines on global issues such as migration, heritage, and colonialism.

This project investigates the transposition of natural historical material, knowledge and vision, between different media (collection, scientific drawing, academic texts, the visual arts and/or literature) – a transmission that happens in the borderline between the traditional, emblematic worldview…

How did learned natural historical inquiries into the underwater world develop in eighteenth-century Europe?

What is it like to study at the Humanities Faculty of Leiden University? Soon-to-be students experienced a day at university during the Experience Day 2017 and found out what studying really is about.

At the end of May, the Leiden English Language and Culture Programme, formerly known as the Department of English Language and Literature, celebrated its 75th anniversary (starting from the appointment of the first professor of English Studies). Over 220 alumni, staff present and past, and students…

Data sets available for scientific/research purposes.

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…

This project proposes to connect two discourses highly present in contemporary literary criticism in China, as well as on the world literary scene and academic circles: the discussion on emigration literature and the concept of ‘essayness’ derived mainly from (post)modern Western theories of the ess…

Get the most out of your studies at Leiden University by taking part in our extracurricular activities.

If you are interested in an academic programme, but do you not wish to complete the entire programme? Then, you can choose one of the many à la carte courses the Faculty of Humanities offers.

Conference

The University of Bologna organizes a Summer School in Classical Languages, offering intensive courses in Latin and/or Greek (20 June – 23 July 2022). The deadline for applications is: 10 June 2022.

In 2024, many of our students and staff won great prizes and secured important research grants.

The present project aims to provide valuable insights for the professional development of international teachers, and also for improving the quality of foreign language education.

Five thousand years before the common era (BCE), Proto-Indo-European, the mother of many languages that are spoken today in Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, originated in eastern Europe. PhD candidate Axel Palmér has combined a 175-year-old hypothesis with new techniques to demonstrate how descendants…

Claartje Levelt is professor of First Language Acquisition. She researches how babies and toddlers learn their mother tongue. Besides her work, she enjoys being involved with music.

PhD Research Projects:

Why did 'character', 'habit', and 'virtue' serve as key terms in late 19th and early 20th-century scholarly correspondences, biographies, and obituaries? Why did scholars around 1900 display so much interest in the working habits and character traits of what they called the 'scholarly self'?

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship? Want to learn more? Then sign up for the new MOOC…

It's the middle of summer and the lecture halls are full. Students from all parts of the world have come to Leiden and The Hague for a summer school, on subjects varying from linguistics to international criminal law and from physics to biopharmaceutical sciences. Lecturers and students talk about what…

After a successful career as a singer, Esmee Schoones started studying French a few years ago. It resulted in a national award for her thesis on musical arrangements of Verlaine's poems and a job teaching French.

Lecture, Descriptive Linguistic Seminars

How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

On 28 October, Leiden University received the first Javanese Culture Prize from Universitas Sebelas Maret in Solo, Indonesia. The jury praised Leiden University’s extensive collection of Indonesian and Javanese manuscripts.

The knowledge held by indigenous people is essential if you want to study the history or the language of a particular region. Leiden archaeologists and linguists are now looking for ways of involving local people more systematically in their research.

No fewer than three Leiden University Humanities scholars have been awarded funding from the NWO’s Free Competition in the Humanities programme: two grants of 750,000 euros and one of 705,000 euros. In total, twelve researchers have received a grant in the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities domain.

Papyrology+, founded in 2014, is a collaboration of Leiden scholars studying (Abnormal) Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Arabic papyri from a socio-historical, economic and linguistic perspective. Papyrology+ aims to explore new opportunities and directions in the study of ancient…

The Faculty of Science

This master’s programme combines advanced levels of philosophical analysis with the study of non-Western sources, in particular Chinese, Indian, and Arabic sources.

Leiden University Lecturer Lettie Dorst wins a prestigious Comenius Senior Fellow grant for a project about machine translation and its use in higher education.

The BA in Linguistics programme draws on Leiden University’s renowned expertise in linguistics to bring students the widest range of subjects and languages offered by any institute in Europe. As a student, you will have the chance to study nearly extinct languages, to be involved in experimental research…

The Nietzsche-Wörterbuch (NWB) has evolved into a long-term, multi-volume work on a global scale with around 30 contributors from a range of disciplines located all over the world