How do opinions form and change in large groups of people? That's not just a sociological question, it's a mathematical one. PhD candidate Federico Capannoli studied opinion dynamics. He defended his thesis on November 19.

The project ‘Founding an Inclusive Space’ investigates the histories of various LGBT+ archives in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Doctoral research on the history of the critical visitor and their efforts at founding alternative archives including LGBT+-focused, feminist, disability and digitizing projects, resulting in a traveling exhibition on findings (with audio-guides), popular and scholarly article, and a dissertation.

PhD candidate Johannes Boer conducted research on the eminent Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA). As part of his research he composed an opera featuring Monteverdi in the leading role.

This year it is 40 years ago that LOVA was established, which we want to celebrate with a seminar around the theme “Gender Moves”. We invite you to join us on May 10, 2019, at Leiden University, to explore how gender is enacted and reproduced in movement and how gendered movement contributes to dismantling…

Leiden University experiments with Virtual Reality as a learning experience.

As Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW) fellow, Tesse Stek will explore the intricate relationship between the history of ideas about Roman imperialism and contemporary archaeological interpretation.

On 20 November, Special Professor of United Nations Studies in Peace and Justice, Alanna O'Malley, presented her research agenda for the next 3 years. An ambitious agenda full of projects to gain more insight into the origin and functioning of the UN.

Friday 30 January 2015 were the final presentations of the last course of the Minor Sustainable Development.

Friday 25 September, 2015 marks the official launch of Leiden University's Central and East European Studies (CEES) Center.

Anar Ahmadov, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at LUC, has been awarded NIAS Individual Fellowship by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW).

The aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of daily life, diet, mobility and health in late medieval Zeeland, as well as to test the potential of multi-isotopic analyses on a Dutch assemblage.

Promotor: W. Jiskoot, Co-promotor: H.A. Every

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

In the depots of the Faculty of Archaeology, many artifacts, accumulated after decades of fieldwork across the world, are stored. A new project, the Leiden Inventory Depot (LID), aims to unlock this wealth of information to the outside world. The 3D scanning of objects takes a central role in this endeavor.…

Ambroise Paré, Thomas Sydenham and Herman Boerhaave: all were great medical innovators in their time. We know far less about the 19th-century Russian physician and scientist Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. PhD candidate Inge Hendriks researched him in Dutch and Russian archives and collections. She discovered…

Lecture, Book Presentation

If male budgerigars can successfully open a puzzle box with food, they become more attractive to females. Biologist Carel ten Cate and Chinese colleagues published experimental evidence for this in a paper in Science on 11 January. Various Dutch and international media wrote about the paper.

Interested in Area Studies? Then Leiden is the place to be! Join our Online Area Studies Week from 2-5 June to find out more. From Africa to Brasil and from Korea to Russia, Leiden covers all areas and fields, both in language, literature, history, politics and socio-economics. Join our live Q&As!

You can find an overview of events organized by the Platform for Post-Colonial Readings below.

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

Essays in Honour of Olivier P. Nieuwenhuyse

Professor Chinese Frank Pieke becomes research and general director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlijn.

Professor Jan-Bart Gewald has been appointed as the new director of the African Studies Centre in Leiden with effect from 1 September 2017, for a period of five years. Professor Gewald will succeed Ton Dietz, who will be retiring in September.

Ambassador Hyoung Chan Choe of South Korea paid his first visit to Leiden University Nov. 22, where he was received by President Annetje Ottow and Professor of Korea Studies Remco Breuker.

Andrea Cortellari, a 2020 graduate of the MA program in Middle Eastern Studies at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, wins the best MA thesis prize by the Society for Turkic, Ottoman, and Turkish Studies.

There seem to be genes that influence how our brains develop over time. A large international consortium has discovered this with an extensive study. The results of the study were recently published in Nature Neuroscience.

Provenance and distribution of raw materials

How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

Leiden biophysicist Stefano Coppola has received the prestigious AXA Research Fund postdoctoral fellowship. With this grant he can work for two years on a project to research the role of mechanical factors in the development of pancreatic cancer.

Two researchers at Leiden University who have recently received their doctorates have been awarded Rubicon grants to carry out research abroad. Both will be going to the US. one to conduct research on the spread of tumours and and the other to study nuclear fusion.

Researchers from Leiden University will develop a new approach to study the biomarkers of Alzeimer’s disease. This approach focusses on the molecular messengers of the cells. The project, led by Thomas Hankemeier and coordinated by Yuliya Shakalisava (Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research, LACDR),…

History and Religious Studies in Leiden rank # 17 and #32 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject. With this, History in Leiden ranks as the best in The Netherlands and Religious Studies ranks as second best.

Three Dutch research institutes - including the Leiden University’s KITLV - will conduct a follow-up study on the use of violence during the Dutch East Indies war of decolonisation (1945 – 1950). The government has designated 4.1 million Euros for this study.

At the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), scholars have been studying the Indian subcontinent with attention and expertise for more than 100 years. This part of South Asia is an economic giant with a population of over two billion. Nira Wickramasinghe, Professor of Modern South Asian Studies,…

The latest issue of NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion debates dr. Markus Altena Davidsen’s vision for the future of religious studies in the Netherlands. Comparison, theory formation, and valorization are among the elements that Davidsen urges scholars of religion to prioritize in order…

The Choose a Language Day was created to make high school students enthusiastic about choosing a linguistic profile and further education. Third-years were able to learn about different language studies at the Faculty of Humanities.

Prof. dr. Judi Mesman has been appointed professor of the interdisciplinary study of societal challenges, representing a shared chair between the Faculties Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) and Social and Behavioral Sciences (FSW) at Leiden University.

The study ‘From Law to Practice: Towards a Roadmap to Strengthen Children’s Rights in the Era of Biomedicine’ written by experts from Leiden Law School and submitted to the Council of Europe’s Committee on Bioethics is now available online.

Salvador Santino Regilme, Jr. Associate Professor of International Relations and Program Chair of MA in International Relations, has been honored with the Cecil B. Currey Book Award for 2023. The accolade, presented by the Association for Global South Studies (AGSS), recognizes Regilme’s exceptional…

This book explores the Indian tradition of liberalism through a critical intellectual biography of Valangaiman Sankaranarayana Srinivasa Sastri (1869–1946).

The current and future board of F.D.L. Gibalaux, the study association of the French language and culture programme, talk about the association, the change of board, their experiences and plans.

For two decades, language experts were certain that babies were able to learn language rules from as young as the age of seven months. However, recent research carried out by a consortium of four Dutch baby labs led by researchers from Leiden cast doubts on this certainty. We spoke to researchers Andreea…

As of February 1st, 2018, Sarah de Rijcke has been appointed as Professor of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, especially Science and Evaluation Studies, at Leiden University. The chair is located at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS).

The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The way of Intersectionality. This project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility within their organization, collection, and exhibition spaces that meets the breadth of demands placed by today’s “critical visitors.” Fifteen…

Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

Doctoral research on recent developments in museological practices by “critical” curators, interventionist artists, and personnel initiatives, focusing on ‘queering’ as an entrance point to broader intersectional issues; resulting in a report on the ‘Queer Baseline’ (to be launched in 2020), a popular…

During his bachelor's programme in International Studies, Tom de Groot became fascinated by the theme of peace and security. Now he designs and moderates training courses to help professionals develop further in this field.