This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

Leiden heritage expert Sjoerd van der Linde is carrying out research on the heritage of the Caribbean region. This research forms part of the international Nexus 1492 project on the consequences of colonisation for the Americas. ‘We first have to find out what the local population wants.'

Our team is involved in the translation and adaptation of several questionnaires, for research purposes. Information about each questionnaire is listed below.

The Hans Franken Lecture honors the legacy of Prof. Dr. Mr. Hans Franken, a founding figure of eLaw in 1985.

Our library contains around 23,000 books, journals and historical documents under the care of a specialized librarian.

The International Institute of Air and Space Law, founded in 1985, collaborates with many world-class academic institutions.

Conference

We are happy to announce that the following missions have been approved by the Ministry of Antiquities, pending final security confirmations:

On the evening of Tuesday January 31st, the physics institute organizes its triannual meeting for over seventy high school teachers. The program consists of lectures on developments in modern physics and the latest initiatives in the world of education.

Archaeologist Hayley Mickleburgh studies how bodies decompose. This helps with the reconstruction of changes in the burial rituals of Caribbean Indians.

The battle at the Tollense valley took place in 1300 BC, the Bronze age. The archaeological site now is being threatened by climate chance. In an international collaboration, archaeologist Martijn Manders and his students are involved in the ongoing fieldwork.

A European team of astronomers has discovered the largest stellar black hole in the Milky Way. It is more than thirty times as massive as our sun and is located in the constellation of Aquila, about two thousand light-years from Earth. The astronomers stumbled upon the black hole by chance while preparing…

The map application includes information from old and new buildings archaeological projects. This makes it possible to investigate whether water facilities (wells, cisterns) and waste facilities (cesspits, sewers) were the privilege of Leiden’s wealthy elite in the late 16th and 17th centuries or whether…

The Leiden LIS Sectoral Income Inequality Dataset, assembled by Chen Wang, Stefan Thewissen and Olaf van Vliet (Version 1.1, March 2014), contains information on multiple indicators of earnings inequality and employment within 9 sectors and 12 subsectors, drawing upon micro data from Luxembourg Income…

An international team of researchers, involving members from the ERC Synergy project NEXUS 1492 based at the Leiden University, the Universities of Oklahoma, Copenhagen and York reveal challenges when studying ancient microbiomes in a recent issue of Scientific Reports.

As part of the NEXUS1492 project, this project will use ancient DNA techniques to shed new light on the demographic and health history of the Caribbean and the impact of European colonization on indigenous communities in the region.

Beautiful microscopic specimens play the leading role in the course 'Biodiversity Plant' for first-year Biology students. Normally these are put back in storage right after the course. But not this year!

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden University’s Faculty of Science with two Nigerian universities, the Center for Basic Space Science and University of Nigeria.

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

Sandra Palmen studied tax law at Leiden University and built a career within central government, currently as State Secretary. She was one of the first to raise the alarm about the child benefits affair and is now righting the wrongs.

300 hundred man went down with Dutch VOC vessel ‘de Rooswijk’ on January 9 1740 for the coast of Deal in the UK.

On Sunday August 19, the National Geographic channel programme 'Drain the Oceans' will focus on Martijn Manders' excavation of the Dutch VOC ship De Rooswijk.

Sofia Ranchordas (1985) has been appointed Chair European and Comparative Public Law and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. She will start this position on October 1st.

ESA’s space telescope Gaia, which maps the Milky Way, completes its active phase of scanning the sky on 15 January. Over the past decade, Gaia has made more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other cosmic objects. ‘Gaia is already the discovery machine of the decade,’ Leiden…

On 9 September, in the presence of King Willem Alexander, Secretary of State Sander Dekker presented the Spinoza Prize to four researchers, including two researchers from Leiden: archaeologist Corinne Hofman and physicist Dirk Bouwmeester. In the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague, they unveiled their plans for…

During the Faculty Staff Meeting of August 28th, Corinne Hofman spoke about her time on the Faculty Board. “I look back on a rich decade in which I have seen the Faculty, and the University as a whole, change at a rapid pace.”

Below you can find lists of Leiden-based and international organizations working on Central Asia, and an overview of useful resources on Central Asia.

In honour of Krijn Rietveld (1956 - 2018), Leiden University Fund and dsm-firmenich have created the Krijn Rietveld Memorial Awards to reward researchers who make extraordinary efforts to bring about an impact beyond scientific understanding in the field of life sciences, health science, biotech, or…

Mazatec chants and ancient Mesoamerican pictography

The awards honour Krijn Rietveld’s vision of science that creates real-world impact. Explore how the programme evolved, how the awards are structured today, and the values that continue to inspire researchers across disciplines.

In 2010, the remnants of a 16th century indigenous village were discovered in St. Vincent, on the construction terrain of the new International Argyle Airport.

Since August 2017, dr. Sarah Schrader is working at the Faculty of Archaeology in the department of Archaeological Sciences. Her expertise is human osteology with a specific focus on the bio-archaeological reconstruction of daily activities. Recently she took over the management of the Osteoarchaeology…

The Faculty of Archaeology proudly presents the research brochure Perspectives on the Past, featuring passionate, dedicated researchers introducing a dazzling scala of research topics: from present-day traditional knowledge in Africa to the power of glue in Palaeolithic Europe. In addition to these…

This research project is an integral part of its mother-programme NEXUS1492 ERC Synergy Project directed by Prof. Corinne Hofman. Overarchingly, it aims at understanding and bridging from the archaeological perspective the late pre-colonial and early colonial history of the Southeastern Caribbean macroregion…

The European Space Agency (ESA) has published an interim data release from Gaia, the space telescope mapping out the Milky Way in 3D. The first scientific papers published today reveal half a million stars in the Omega Centauri globular cluster, nearly 400 candidate gravitational lensers and the positions…

Christmas is coming, which means that 'Our Talents and Discoveries 2016' has been distributed. This also means that it is time to vote for the 'Discoverer of the year 2016'. Each of the eight institutes nominated one researcher that excelled in the past year. Who is your favourite?

The research article ‘The life history of an enslaved African’ is one of the top 20 read Archaeometry articles in the period of January 2017 to December 2018.

ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.

‘In a hole under water there lived a hobbit’: a new species of shrimp named after Bilbo Baggings. Biology student Werner de Gier described this newly discovered species during his bachelor internship at Naturalis Biodiversity Center.

An international team of astronomers led by Violeta Gámez Rosas (Leiden University) has observed a supermassive black hole hidden in a ring of dust. This discovery fits the idea that the so-called active centers of galaxies are much more similar than observations show, because the viewing angle from…

With the help of software that mimics a human brain, ESA’s Gaia satellite spotted six stars zipping at high speed from the centre of our Galaxy to its outskirts. This could provide key information about some of the most obscure regions of the Milky Way.

On 1-2 November, Professor Luuk van Middelaar spoke at the Academic Conference “EU Constitutional Imagination: Between ideology and utopia” at the University of Copenhagen.

How has landscape and land use changed in these two case studies since independence? What has caused these changes, whether anthropogenic or natural? How do local communities in the areas of study perceive these changes? How can community knowledge be integrated with mapping tools (GIS) to contribute…

Forum essays provide a framework for intellectual exchange and debate about the role of diplomacy around a particular theme. The essays are argumentative contributions and are shorter than research articles.

Archaeologist Hayley Mickleburgh has already appeared in the Dutch papers a few times already due to her unusual work: the study of decomposing bodies. She studied at Leiden University, where she is now a researcher.

Two short documentaries by Till F. Sonnemann highlight the work conducted by Leiden archaeologists on Hispaniola as part of the Nexus1492 project.

Recently, we have witnessed an increased interest of the public and media in the hidden world of underwater archaeology sparked by the identification of a shipwreck as

Tim Koopmans is one of the great minds in the history of Dutch and European legal scholarship. He taught law as a professor in Leiden and other universities, among which Ghent, Cambridge, Utrecht. He practiced it as a judge in the European Court of Justice and Advocate-General in the Dutch Supreme Court,…