Writing a master’s thesis in Political Science is a demanding yet rewarding journey. Every year, students deliver impressive research that showcases their analytical skills and academic rigor. This year, one thesis stood out for its exceptional quality. On 31 October 2025, during the master’s graduation…

Behavioural biologist Wouter Halfwerk has been awarded a 2-year outgoing Rubicon-grant from NWO. He will be working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute with bats and frogs to understand the evolution of multimodal communication.

The Perfect Spectator. The experience of the art work and reception aesthetics. By Janneke Wesseling

Joost Grootens contributes the introductory essay ‘Charles Joseph Minard: Critical Practice’ to the book ‘Le Système Minard’ on the French pioneer in the representation of statistical data in the 19th century.

More than 100 anthropologists work at Leiden University – not only at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CA/DS) in the Faculty of Social Sciences, but also within other faculties, for example at Archaeology, Law, the Humanities, or the Leiden University Medical Centre…

The six-feet society is being built up rapidly; arrows and planes made of tape, circles and stripes of chalk, fences and other barriers are popping up around us. Danica Mast, PhD-student at LIACS, collects photos of all these solutions on her website www.1meter50.nl, now that her research is partly…

Matthew Canfield (LAW/VVI), Nadia Sonneveld (Law/VVI), Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela (CADS) and Elisa Da Vià (HUM) have received a KIEM grant of € 10.000 for their project 'Picturing Scholasticide'. The grant will be utilised to create a multimodal exhibition of the scholasticide in Gaza. Through photography,…

De UGent is op zoek naar een PhD-student binnen het project "A Pragmatic Reality: The Performance and Codification of Collective Agency in the ‘Age of Freedom’ of Urban Communities in the Southern Low Countries and Northern France (late 11th - early 13th Centuries)". Deadline: 31 maart 2023.

The Huizinga Institute offers an online masterclass that explores how material, visual, and paratextual elements in manuscripts and printed books developed between 1400 and 1600, and how this influenced the ways in which readers navigated the book and experienced the text it contained. Deadline for…

The Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University invites paper proposals on late antique and medieval Syriac iconography and visual culture for a virtual conference to be held on September 17–18, 2021. Abstracts should be between 300–500 words and should be submitted to acady@princeton.edu…

The Sinbad project has moved into the second year of its life

Is it ever truly silent? In this TEDx talk at the University of Leiden, ACPA PhD Guy Livingston delves into the meaning of silence and its power and encourages us to seek it in our own lives.

A virtual hand that feels as if it is your own. Feeling happier because a virtual face is smiling with you. Cognitive Psychologist Ke Ma discovered using virtual reality that the way we experience our body is more flexible than we thought. Ma: ‘We can think up some fantastic applications.' PhD defence…

PhD student Robbin Bastiaansen applies mathematics to get insight in practical problems. By comparing mathematical models with developments in existing ecosystems, he hopes to demystify the process of desertification. His research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

What does it mean to be a migrant in a big city? According to assistant professor Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues, artists have the answer to that question. In a new ERC-funded project, she will explore the representation of contemporary urban diversity in films, performance art, written literature and spoken…

Ecologist Pengxuan Xie investigated whether rooftop farming can contribute to food production in cities. This is important now traditional food supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions.

How can artist PhD candidates research their own work? They need to be good at switching from maker to critical observer and their research has to have a solid theoretical basis. This is the premise of Professor Janneke Wesseling. The aesthetic value of their work also has to be up for discussion. Inaugural…

Three of our researchers have been awarded a certificate for receiving enough downloads to be in the top 10% of papers in 2022

On 8, 9 & 10 October Share the LUVE takes place, the graduation show with the work of this year’s graduates of the Cultural Anthropology master Visual Ethnography. In three days 22 films, a graphic novel, artwork and photos will be presented in De Buurt, close to Leiden Central Station. If you don’t…

Stefan Belderbos was the first visual artist to undertake PhD research in the arts at Leiden University. His doctoral defence is on 2 December. Not only will he defend his dissertation on the integration of performance art in liturgy, he will also exhibit the material results of his research in the…

Researchers from Leiden and Delft have found a way to look inside early-modern bookbindings. An x-ray technique has allowed them to search for remains of medieval manuscripts hidden inside the bindings. After the Middle Ages many manuscripts were recycled, their pages pasted inside bookbindings to provide…

Children with hearing loss often fail to pick up on nuances in other people’s emotional responses. As a result, they do not always understand what is going on. Yung-Ting Tsou, a PhD student at Leiden University, found that having more knowledge of emotions and social conventions can help them in their…

‘Art and science can co-exist.’ On 16 August, Dean Suzan Stoter spoke these words when she opened the exhibition ‘Wet op beeld: De Saksenspiegel eeuwenoud modern’, created by visual artist Ilja Walraven and legal scholar Helen Stout. They believe that images can enhance the comprehensibility of legal…

The studies of two researchers previously working within the VICI-project ‘Art, Agency and Living Presence’ are now published by Leiden University Press in conjunction with Akademie Verlag.

In November 2019 visual artist and PhDArts candidate Riccardo Giacconi obtained the doctoral degree with the research project The Variational Mode. This summer Giacconi has been awarded a LUF grant for the research project The ‘Option’ aftermath in South Tyrol. The research will be conducted at the…

From 3-6 December 2019 the conference “The Ties that Bind”: Mechanisms and Structures of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire will take place. Deadline for sending in your abstract: 31 January 2019.

Bachelor's students Larissa van Beckhoven, Eeke Brussee and Mirjam de Haan were granted the Speckmann award for their Fieldwork NL report ‘Een Tastbaar Mysterie’ (supervisor: Bregje ter Meer). Alumnus Markus Enk received the Master's Speckmann award for his innovative thesis called ‘Do spirits resist…

Researchers, policymakers and funders have to take more account of the effect of sex and gender in scientific research. This is the view presented in an advice paper published by LERU, the League of European Research Universities. The lead author is Vice-Rector Simone Buitendijk.

The environmental risks of new pesticides containing nanoparticles are inadequately researched, according to four Leiden scientists in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology. They call for an examination of the long-term and environmental effects of pesticides containing nanoparti…

Producing offspring of a crop without sowing and that is even bigger than the parent plant. According to Leiden researchers this can be achieved by overstimulating a single gene that rejuvenates cells, including bringing them back to the embryonic phase.

Five projects with a lead applicant from Leiden will receive an Open Science Fund grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Junk news sites with unknown names such as Trendnieuws and Viraal Vandaag reach millions of Dutch people thanks to their Facebook pages. Messages from those pages are much more often shared and liked than messages from pages from well-known news media such as De Telegraaf, NOS and NU.nl. This is shown…

Green cities and a well-protected food system: Roy Remme and Oliver Taherzadeh study ways to achieve these. But how can their scientific findings lead to societal change? They share their experiences with science-policy initiatives.

The radio telescope LOFAR, with a major contribution from Leiden Observatory, has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made. Never before have so many cosmic radio sources been captured in a single survey: 13.7 million.

The environmental policy (Duurzaamheidsbeleidplan) of Leiden University insisted on starting a Green Office to expand and promote sustainability within Leiden University. This plan has now become reality as we have started with several activities and projects. To make people understand what a Green…

The Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, with additional support from the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity (CSLA) and the Center for Collaborative History (CCH), organizes a virtual conference on Syriac Iconography. This conference gathers diverse scholars from across the…

We are happy to announce the 4th annual LION Image Award!

We are happy to announce the 3rd annual LION Image Award!

On 18 and 19 October 2018 the PhDArts Conference took place at the P.J. Veth building in Leiden.

On 1 November 2019, international Master's students Data Science from Leiden University presented the elaboration of their data concepts to senior officials of the House of Representatives and Rijks I-Ecosysteem. With the presentation, they successfully completed this part of the Data Science master…

Finally, it's high time for the yearly LION Image award. Send us your most impressive, beautiful or insightful physics image, and win eternal fame on top of 100 euros, and a year long exhibition on the LION picture wall.

What does a 19th-century exhibition of traditional utensils from the province of Zeeland tell us about the current rise of populism? A lot, Ad Maas will say in his inaugural lecture.

The Gouy-Chapman theory describes what happens near an electrode when it is in contact with a salt solution, but this description does not match reality. Researcher Kasinath Ojha, assistant professor Katharina Doblhoff-Dier and professor Marc Koper present a new version. ‘The next generation of textbooks…

Koen Keijzer combined three mathematical models into one unified system capable of making meaningful predictions about how cells form blood vessels. This helps biologists studying the chaotic, leaky blood vessels found in and around tumours.

Students who also want to develop their artistic talents can take a year-long art class – Practicum Artium – at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. ‘I can express my creativity and am learning to approach subjects in a visual way.’

What was the function of the Dutch Protestant Church in Sri Lankan society? Why did people relate to the Church and how did conversion influence their life course?

As children learn, develop and acquire more skills, their legal position also changes. Professor of Children’s Rights Ton Liefaard works closely together with Leiden social sciences researchers to shed light on these growing capacities and their implications for our legal system. ‘Our ideas about children’s…

Research on this theme concerns the legitimacy and effectiveness of Europe’s institutional order in the face of public alienation and normative contestation.

Improving environmental risk assessment of pesticides in surface waters