Your time at Leiden is about more than just studying. Some of your best experiences will stem from being a part of our lively and diverse student community, as well as from life in the beautiful city of Leiden.

Leiden University offers ambitious students a world-class environment in which to reach their full potential.

Your time at Leiden is about more than just studying. Some of your best experiences will stem from being a part of our lively and diverse student community, as well as from life in the beautiful city of Leiden.

We are convinced that you’ll have a wonderful time at Leiden University, but you don’t have to take our word for it. If you’re looking for objective opinions of what it’s like to study here, listen to what current students and alumni have said about it!

Leiden University offers ambitious students a world-class environment in which to reach their full potential.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the three priority areas of Leiden University, which was established by its Executive Board in 2014. The objective is to set up a comprehensive strategy.

Lecture, Blue History Network Graduate Forum

On 3 December 2019 Hanna Bosdriesz defended her dissertation on the fight against impunity for grave human rights violations in Latin America.

Rachel Schats has been a familiar face at the Faculty of Archaeology since she started her bachelor’s in Archaeology in 2005. Now she is an assistant professor, working on her Veni project on malaria in the Middle Ages. ‘I have included in this project so many skeletal collections that no one has ever…

The hinterland of important centres like Petra (Southern Jordan) can provide essential information that contribute to the understanding of their rise, expansion and decline.

On Tuesday November 25, 2025, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey traveled with students from her masters seminar on “New Approached to the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe” taught at the History Institute to Amsterdam for a unique opportunity. There, Ms. Lotte Sophie Groenendijk, an alum of the History…

The stadtholder’s court in the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands has long been underestimated. Real courts and the associated court culture were to be found elsewhere in Europe. PhD candidate Quinten Somsen is trying to reverse this image. ‘The stadtholder’s court was actually very lively.’

Louis Sicking's Maritime Conflict Management in Atlantic Europe was awarded an 'Internationalisation in the Humanities' grant from NWO. What can we learn from how maritime conflicts were managed in the past?

On Tuesday November 25, 2025, Sarah Cramsey travelled with students from her masters seminar on 'New Approached to the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe' taught at the History Institute to Amsterdam for a unique opportunity. There, Lotte Sophie Groenendijk, an alumna of the History Research Masters…

On the occasion of the retirement of Robert Ross, Professor in African History at Leiden University, his successor and former student Jan-Bart Gewald wrote a valedictory note.

On April 26th, Kate Bellamy succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Kate on this great result.

On the 22nd of April, Liszt Vianna Neto successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Liszt Vianna Neto on this achievement.

The times between the Neolithic and Urban revolutions in Mesopotamia have for a long time been interpreted as a period of stagnation. This volume is part of an emerging discourse that challenges such assumptions.

The Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (VVI) is part of the Leiden Law School.

An archaeological case-study of the Pointe des Châteaux, La Désirade and Les Îles de la Petite Terre micro-region, Guadeloupe, F.W.I.

In Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, Emeritus Professor Mineke Schipper reflects on myths about ‘the end’.

Kohei Suzuki and his co-authors reflect on their extensive scholarly experience teaching comparative public administration across diverse countries including Canada, the Netherlands, Qatar, and the United States.

Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we address the limits and potential of montage.

Why is there no Northeast Asian security architecture? Assessing the strategic impediments to a stable East Asia. In this article, published in 'The Pacific Review', the authors Wang (Peking University) en Stevens (Leiden University) discuss the reasons why.

In this article, Kuipers and Timmermans analyze the first lady's relationship with policy problems in the period 1945-2013.

Modern receptions of Graeco-Roman Antiquity are important ideological markers of the ways we envisage our own twenty-first-century societies. An urgent topic of study is: what kinds of narratives – sometimes controversial – about Antiquity do people create for themselves at this moment in time, and…

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Mouse models are commonly used to assess the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins and to investigate the immunological processes leading to antidrug antibodies. The aim of this work was to develop a transgenic (TG) Balb/c mouse model for evaluating the immunogenicity of recombinant human insulin (insulin)…

At LUCL, researchers aim to understand, describe, and preserve the linguistic diversity of the indigenous Americas.

On 29 June May 2022 Yujing Tan successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Has there been continuity or change in US counterterrorism policy since 9/11? What factors led to the continuity or change, and how do we classify any such continuity or change?

In this provocative study, Shumon T. Hussain engages with the long-standing issue of French-Anglophone research conflicts in Palaeolithic archaeology.

On the 29th of June, Martin Kohlberger successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Martin on this achievement!

On the 12th of May, Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta on this achievement.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of the archaeology of Syria from the end of the Paleolithic period to 300 BC.

This book is about the archaeology of indigenous peoples who thrived across the Caribbean, the Guianas, and the Lower Amazon basin just before the European invasion, and who also remained central to the early history of conquest and colonization.

The Centre for Indigenous America Studies (CIAS) at Leiden University is designed to coordinate and promote the teaching and research of Indigenous languages, literatures, cultures and cultural heritage. Our aim is to contribute to an increased acknowledgement, recognition and understanding of Indigenous…

This dissertation presents a comprehensive description of Xinka, an indigenous language from southeastern Guatemala. The description is based on a missionary grammar that is titled Arte de la lengua szinca and was written by the priest Manuel Maldonado de Matos around 1773.

The Department of Archaeological Heritage and Society focuses on the relationships between past and present, the role of heritage in society, and how heritage can contribute to the improving quality of life and our (future) environment.

Lecture, Sign Languages & Deaf People

This book concerns cultural production in contemporary Latin American cities: chaotic cities where the ideal of order has become fragmented and the walls of the lettered city have become porous. New and multifarious urban trajectories—intersecting, colliding, superimposing—trace the image of the postmodern…

The human body consists of hundreds, perhaps thousands of different types of cells, each with different morphologies and functions, despite having the same genome.

Through extensive archaeological and documentary research, this study aims to provide a detailed analysis of the maritime cultural landscape of St. Eustatius over the past four centuries. It focuses on bridging the gap between the marine and terrestrial worlds and demonstrates that in order to truly…

This dissertation aims to establish a dialogue between ethnomusicology (more specifically indigenous organology), the anthropology of art and the culture of the Apinaye peoples, in order to understand how the musical objects of these peoples are learned and taught, and thus to understand its musical…