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.

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…

Throughout the coming year, all attention in Leiden will be on Asia. This special year, featuring numerous Asian events, conferences, exhibitions and concerts, celebrates the new Asian Library at Leiden University. Come and read, watch, listen, taste or dance Bollywood style.

How do local, non-institutional ideas about end-of-life care influence professional palliative care and vice versa? These questions will be answered by medical anthropologists Annemarie Samuels and Natashe Lemos Dekker in the coming years.

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.

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

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Alumni event

In the Netherlands, as elsewhere in the world, many patients who are in a palliative care trajectory prefer not to receive full or explicit medical information. This is more often the case for patients with ethnic or cultural minority backgrounds. As open-information provision is the norm, non-disclosure…

In September, the Una Europa ELSEA project, Enhancing Scholarship in Eastern Africa, officially started. Now that the project has been running for a couple of months, it’s high time to check in and see how the project is going.

This book by Dirk Jacob Jansen traces the career of Jacopo Strada (Mantua 1515-Vienna 1588), examining his role at court in Vienna, where he served as Imperial architect and antiquary. Strada’s career was unusually wide in scope and cosmopolitan in outlook even for a Renaissance artist.

In a well-filled Telders Auditorium, university learners of Korean competed with each other to see who speaks Korean the best.

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…

Debate, LUCL Fireside Chat

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…

The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

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Communication is the transmission of information. All day long we are busy explaining and making things clear to each other, but exactly how we do that varies from language to language. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal delved into African Bantu languages for a Vidi project.

Leiden University has a long tradition of Asian language education. Chinese, Japanese and Korean partners are essential in providing a practical side of learning education.

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.'

In the South and Southeast Asian Studies programme, you will gain a strong foundation in academic, language, and critical thinking skills essential to understanding the history, culture, and modern context of this dynamic and increasingly important region.

Leiden University has a longstanding and dynamic partnership with institutions in Indonesia. The collaboration is rooted in a shared commitment to advancing knowledge and science through collaborative research, education, and equitable knowledge exchange. The partnership reflects a relationship of mutual…

Growing political pressure and increasing restrictions on academic freedom forced Cultural Studies scholar Maisha Wester to leave her tenured research position at Indiana University. Thanks to the Tulip Fund grant, she will now continue her work at Leiden University.

The fourth edition of the Middle Eastern Culture market was a great success with more than 2000 visitors over the weekend. Attendees participated in the many workshops, attended lectures, and shopped at the market stands.

Prof. dr. Marcel Cobussen will take part in a research network project in London.

In tracing intra-site, local and regional craft networks in Late Bronze Age Tiryns (Greece) the project aimed to understand technological changes, (dis)continuities and social practices from the Late Palatial until the Post Palatial periods in Mycenaean Greece.

What did colonial officials and missionaries think they were doing?

After having been cancelled in 2020, this year the Summer School in Languages and Linguistics is going online. From 12 – 23 July, language and linguistics enthusiasts from all over the world can once again learn about a variety of rare languages and linguistics topics. Director Sasha Lubotsky tells…

Representing Japanese Colonial 'Heritage' in Taiwan

PhD defence

From 17 to 19 September, the University of Granada organized the 27th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM).

Author and political scientist Mounir Samuel has spent recent years delving into the many ways that language can exclude people and bring them together.

Lucien van Beek studied Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, focusing on Ancient Greek. As of February 2015, Van Beek will be project manager at Ineke Sluiter’s Greek-Dutch dictionary project.

Find out how to apply for Japanese Studies (120 EC) at Leiden University by following our step-by step guide.

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