In exactly 450 days’ time, on 8 February 2025, it is the university’s 450th anniversary. We are going to celebrate this with our students, staff, alumni and friends. In the run-up to the anniversary, we are compiling our top 450: Who or what is your favourite?

In 2022, many of our staff and students won fantastic prizes and were awarded important research grants.

Debate

South African professor Lungisile Ntsebeza will receive an honorary doctorate on the Foundation Day of Leiden University on Friday 7 February. Ntsebeza is an authority in the democratisation of rural South Africa and poverty reduction.

Take a walk through any city, and you are likely to come across a brightly coloured mural. Although these paintings often seem to serve solely as a backdrop for Instagram snapshots, art history professor Minna Valjakka says there are rich traditions and intricate histories that uncover more critical…

For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…

How can we best tell the current generations about some of the darkest parts of our past? To answer this question, researchers from Leiden are working with the Gedeeld Verleden, Gezamenlijke Toekomst foundation on public programmes about the Dutch history of slavery.

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

In a speech on Keti Koti the Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, apologised on behalf of the royal family for the Netherlands’ historical role in slavery. What is the significance of this?

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

Is private law ready for the challenges of our time?

Is the legitimacy of law and governance of multilevel jurisdictions diminishing? What is the significance of (diminishing) legitimacy for the effectiveness of law? These kinds of questions about the legitimacy of the supranational formation of law, its application, and the policy and governance based…

This research project from Leiden University looks at the opportunities and threats that flow from the existence of institutional and normative diversity in the area of fundamental rights for the effective protection of those rights in a pluralist world.

Eduard Fosch-Villaronga and Bart Custers from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies wrote an article on Fair Medicine and AI highlighting that AI for biomedical research and healthcare should be beneficent and equitable for everyone.

Academic research on terrorism is getting better all the time. This is the conclusion of university lecturer Bart Schuurman after studying 3,442 articles. He published his study in Terrorism and Political Violence.

'Let's make this a twice-yearly tradition!'– a feeling shared by many after the vibrant Research Day. Engagement started early, with participants connecting informally over good coffee before the formal start of the event on 19 November.

How can we stop the endless stream of spam we receive in our mailbox? Journalist Warner van der Louw of Dutch newspaper ‘Trouw’ puts the question to Bart Custers, Professor of Law and Data Science at eLaw, Center for Law and Digital Technologies.

Former PhD student of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) Bart Thomee has received this year’s Rising Star Award from the Multimedia group of ACM, the worldwide computer science association. Today, Thomee is a successful researcher at Yahoo Labs.

True to tradition, Professor Joanne van der Leun, Dean of Leiden Law School, presented the PAO 2019 teaching prizes to the best in-house and external lecturer during the Leiden Revisited alumni event.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded a grant of 750,000 euros to the 'Visualising the Unknown in 17th-century Science and Society' project. Researchers will reconstruct how seventeenth-century scientists recorded and shared their groundbreaking microscopic discoveries. We…

PhDArts candidate Ruchama Noorda will graduate on Wednesday 9 December 2015

Myths abound about the Pilgrims, the group of religious refugees from England who set sail for America in 1620. Did they really live in peace with the indigenous peoples of America? In an international conference, historians from Leiden will seek to draw attention to the more negative effects of the…

Dr Nadine Akkerman, lecturer in Early Modern Literature and postdoctoral researcher in Leiden, has written a new book to accompany the exhibition on Elizabeth Stuart and Amalia von Solms at the Historical Museum of The Hague. ‘They were like goddesses, constantly trying to upstage one another,’ says…

Seventeenth-century Danish scientist Niels Stensen made groundbreaking discoveries in the anatomy of the body and of Earth. This Leiden alumnus’s theories are still relevant, as an exhibition at the Oude UB shows.

In 2013, Thijs Porck wrote a guest blog for 'medievalfragments'...

On 19 July Erik-Jan Zürcher, professor of Turkish languages and cultures, made a TV appearance in Nieuwsuur to talk about the actions Erdogan took after the failed coup.

Data science offers great opportunities for legal research, according to Simone van der Hof and Bart Custers (eLaw). But at the same time, we have to keep an eye on the unwanted side effects of big data - such as ethnic profiling.

The project officially started in September 2020, but with the enrolment of PhD students Hanum Atikasari and Shajeela Shawkat the research team of the ERC project 'Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life' is compl…

Researchers from eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies, published a new book on EU data protection law.

Three researchers at LUCL have been awarded a VENI-grant by NWO.

Researchers on terrorism Bart Schuurman and Liesbeth van der Heide (Institute of Security and Global Affairs) studied the files of 159 persons convicted of terrorism in the Netherlands during 2012-2017. Their main question: how effective is the special reintegration project for this type of delinquents…

From 1 October, two new Directors of Education will start at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL). Dennis Claessen as the new director for the master's programme of Biology and Marcel Schaaf as director for the Biology bachelor's programme. Claessen and Schaaf have been appointed for a period of four…

On March 7th 2019, eLaw (the Center for Law and Digital Technologies of Leiden University) will participate at the INFORM Final Conference 'Data Protection Summit: Beyond being INFORMed' at the Hilton Hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria.

We are very honoured to announce that on the 1st July Bart Custers has been appointed Professor of Law and Data Science and has thus become the first Professor in the new 'stimuleringsprogramma' SAILS.

On Saturday 3 August 2019 at 10:30 am, a fatal shooting took place in a Walmart in El Paso (Texas, USA). Twenty people died and 26 people were injured. Several researchers from the Institute of Security and Global Affairs of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) have appeared in the media…

In the context of urban challenges, multidisciplinary knowledge adds value. The idea is that urban planners, sociologists, economists, and historians can collectively provide a deeper understanding of what has worked and what hasn't so far. Since 2022, scientists from the University of Indonesia and…

We are excited to announce that Marie Schwed Shenker's research paper, co-authored with Dr Eduard Fosch-Villaronga (Associate Professor at eLaw) and Professor Bart Custers (Professor of Law and Data Science), has been accepted for presentation at the 16th International Conference on Social Robotics…

When we think of unethical medical experiments, we tend to think first of Nazi Germany. What is less well known is that experiments were also carried out in colonised areas without the explicit consent of the test subject. University lecturer Fenneke Sysling has received a European grant to research…

‘Collaboration is increasingly important,’ Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker said at the 445th Dies Natalis of Leiden University on 7 February. But, as he heard from a number of Leiden researchers, this is contingent upon a firm disciplinary basis. A novelty of this year’s celebration was a joint dies…

Conference