If you follow the western media, you are likely to think of ‘Africa’ as the continent of origin of desperate migrants, a continent of hunger and disease and a breeding ground for international terrorism. But if you want to see the bigger picture, you should look no further than the African Studies scholars…

On the 28th of September Go Hirasawa successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Discover the effects of clothing value and lifespan on buyer-user-producer relationships through collaborative research with Localising Global Garment Biographies.

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.

Activity-based protein profiling (ABPP, also termed chemical proteomics), is one of the pillars of chemical biology, and at LED3 we have taken it to the next level. ABPP allows the assessment of protein function in live cells and tissues, which means that the activity of a complete protein family can…

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…

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process. Deaf communities form…

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…

Upcoming activities by PhDArts candidates Basma Hamdy, Danne Ojeda Hernandez and Joost Grootens

News from Food Citizens? Winter School alumnae

Miranda Smit, Ineke van der Ham and colleagues have published a paper in Experimental Brain Research, entitled: Body ownership and the absence of touch: Approaching the rubber hand in- and outside peri-hand space.

On Friday 24th March, Prof. Amanda Perry-Kessaris (Kent Law School) ); who was here for the lecture ‘Exploring the economic life of law with sociological imagination, visual methods and experimental attitude’, Leiden Socio-Legal Lecture Series, as a part of ILS 2.0, gave a short workshop on data visualisation…

The Winter School of the Food Citizens? project has been a success! Running from Monday 24th January to Friday 4th February 2022, with this milestone we handed down the project’s methodological toolkit as a team. Nine participants attended in Leiden, coming from Belgium, Ghana, Italy, Lithuania, the…

Shirley van der Maarel won the Thesis Award 2020 with her thesis 'Terra Incognita'. Van der Maarel graduated summa cum laude for the master's specialisation Visual Ethnography. She researched a group of refugees housed in an Italian village and wrote an interactive thesis and made a film. This resulted…

Op maandag 1 april 2024 stierf onze leermeester, vriend en gewaardeerd collega Dr. Alexander Hendrik de Groot (Sander).

Finally we know for sure that there is a black hole at the centre of our own galaxy. Today, astronomers unveiled the first ever photo of Sagittarius A*, a super-massive object at the centre of the Milky Way. This picture could only be taken thanks to the cooperation of telescopes worldwide.

Chiara Piccoli has been awarded a scholarship by the Italian Research Council to work at the Virtual Heritage Lab of the Institute of Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage (ITABC-CNR) in Rome.

Classics alumnus Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer has won the Libris Literature Prize this year with his book La Superba. The Libris Literature Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in Dutch literature.

Visual Ethnography graduate Ildikó Plájás received the Best documentary award in the student competition at the international Astra Film Festival in Romania.

In September 2021, ACPA PhD Candidate Gabriel Paiuk will premiere a new work titled Sound Theory (The Clouds) as part of the 2021 Gaudeamus Muziekweek Festival. The performance will take place on September 10th, 20:30 at the De Helling (Utrecht, NL).

On November 6th PhDArts Co-Director Dr. Janneke Wesseling has given a keynote presentation, entitled “On Methodology”, at the Symposium Conversations on Artistic Research in Porto (PRT).

The last two months of 2016 were a very productive time for the ACPA. We had no less than 6 promotions!

In September 2019, Manon Mulckhuyse will start a position as assistant professor in the Cognitive Psychology Unit.

Writing with Light Magazine. Issue no.1 is now available for download as a open access pdf/interactive edition or purchase as limited-run print edition. The magazine builds on our prior work with the journals Cultural Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review and the editorial collective consists…

On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, Ambassador Bert Theuerman (Austrian Ambassador to The Netherlands) hosted a Coffeehouse Discussion exploring the position and impact of women in science and arts at his residence in The Hague.

If male budgerigars can successfully open a puzzle box with food, they become more attractive to females. Biologist Carel ten Cate and Chinese colleagues published experimental evidence for this in a paper in Science on 11 January. Various Dutch and international media wrote about the paper.

Ewine van Dishoeck was broadly covered in national and international media with her prestigious Kavli prize for astrophysics. She won 1 million dollars voor her groundbreaking work on star and planet formation and on extraterrestrial life.

In the last week of January, Prof. Rex Arendsen and PhD candidate Maarten Manse of the Department of Tax Law at Leiden Law School, taught an ‘Intensive Course on Tax Law' at the Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta. This week of lectures illustrates the fruitful cooperation between both univer…

Tradition has it that at the end of each academic year, the best master’s thesis in Political Science is awarded a prize. For 2021-2022, the jury is considering six nominations. All of great quality, but on different topics. These range from political party bans to questions regarding commitment within…

Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart has developed a way to use Deep Learning and geography software to rapidly and systematically map prehistoric barrows, Celtic fields, and medieval charcoal kilns. This innovative method has been tested on high-resolution elevation maps from the Veluwe, the Netherlands.…

GroenLinks member of the Dutch House of Representatives Lisa Westerveld has put forward parliamentary questions in response to the dissertation by Maria de Jong-de Kruif, who was awarded a doctorate degree on 7 March 2019 following her research on secure youth care institutions.

Marie Depuydt has won the Van Wersch Springboard Prize. She was awarded the prize on 28 November during the annual Fall symposium. There were seven nominees in total, but the selection committee unanimously chose Depuydt as the winner.

Following the New Year's speech of Dean Hanna Swaab a total of 4 prize winners were showered with praise and flowers during the new year's reception 10 January, 2017. Anthropologist Igor Boog won the Casimir Prize for best lecturer, pedagogue Ilona Schoep the Master Thesis Prize, political scientist…

Together with patient representatives, clinician-researchers from Radboucumc (Internal Medicine) Amsterdam UMC and researchers from Leiden University (Andrea Evers and Henriët van Middendorp) have received the Medical Inspirator Prize 2019 of The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development…

Mirjam Oomens was working on her PhD research on language in the consulting room when she was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. Four years later, she has made it her mission to encourage doctors and other healthcare professionals to make fewer statements about life expectancy. 'Such a conviction can…

On 30 November 2021 the book 'Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography: A Practical and Theoretical Guide' was published by Routledge. The book resulted from eight anthropologists of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology joining forces: Cristina Grasseni, Bart Barendregt, Erik…

Corona be damned, it's high time for the yearly LION Image award! Deadline in a week.

It's time for the 2021 Image Award

In the past months the COVID-19 pandemic has made the world become more reliant on digital communication and social media. As virtual spectators of diplomacy during these times, it is not difficult to notice that diplomacy is more colourful nowadays.

You can find an overview of events organized by the Platform for Post-Colonial Readings below.

AI programmes such as Suno and Udio allow the user to compose songs that bear an uncanny resemblance to the style and vocals of famous artists. Can artists do anything about this?

On the 31st August and 1st September 2023, CompaRe hosted a conference on “Smart and lean integration: finding regional solutions to global challenges” in Leiden University’s Campus The Hague.

The Leiden University Centre for Innovation and the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have won the Surfnet Innovation Challenge. The team won the prize with an experiment to link a virtual 3D anatomical model to a living human body.

Students from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) can combine their visual arts program from the academic year 2017-2018 with the bachelor program Arts, Media and Society at Leiden University.