The Historia Naturalis Brasiliae Reconsidered

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone.

This book focuses on transnationalism as a key concept to evaluate how Europe responds to cross-border security challenges.

The European Commission has selected a consortium of major European launcher and satellite manufacturers, operators and service providers, as well as policy and legal research centres and institutes to study and provide guidelines and recommendations on Space Traffic Management (STM). The IIASL of Leiden…

Now available on YouTube!

In a letter initiated by Wil Roebroeks, among others, serious concerns were raised about three research papers claiming evidence for one of the earliest human occupations of Europe.

On early October, the Master of Laws: Advanced Studies in International Children’s Rights released its October Newsletter to its friends and partner networks.

How do plant defense genes get activated?

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.

This project investigates which metaphors are problematic in machine translation, when, why, and for whom.

In Spring next year, a new and international team of archaeologists, historians, and education experts will start a collaborative project on the archaeology of Molise. The project is generously funded by l’Istituto Regionale per gli Studi Storici del Molise “Vincenzo Cuoco” (IRESMO).

Lecture

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.

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.

Anthropologist Sander Hölsgens explores how skateboarding philosophy can revolutionise education by embracing failure, fostering creativity, and building supportive learning communities. Read his research on The Conversation.

The third seminar of the serie 'Research Methodology for the Study of Governance', organized by the Graduate School of Faculty Campus The Hague, with Professor Markus Haverland (Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Municipalities are increasingly attempting to solve problems without issuing decisions. A notification procedure (notification – investigation – application – decision) has recently been introduced that replaces part of the traditional application procedure. Ymre Schuurmans, Professor of Constitutional…

Leiden University experiments with Virtual Reality as a learning experience.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

Team History of Africa and the Americas

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.

Dr. Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh has been selected for a stay at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) in Amsterdam.

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.

The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

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…

Leiden Law School and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies are very pleased to announce that Dr. Mamadou Hébié will be re-joining the Grotius Centre on the 1st of May 2021.

Wednesday 18 January 2017, a university-wide meeting was organized on the upcoming alterations with regard to the role and tasks of Study Program Committees (Opleidingscommissies; OCs) within Leiden University.

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!

On Wednesday, September 17, 2025, Prof.dr. Sarah Cramsey convened a book manuscript event at the beach of Wassenaar near Leiden to discuss her new book 'Caring through Catastrophe: Jewish Children and their Caretakers during the Holocaust' which is under contract with Indiana University Press.

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

As an interdisciplinary institute in the field of Security Studies, the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) covers various topics in its research, one of which is the United Nations and the impact of this global organization in the world.

The third generation of students of the Master of Laws: Advanced Studies in International Children’s Rights 2017-2018 received their much-coveted master diplomas on Monday 27 August.

Provenance and distribution of raw materials

How do contemporary authorship and scholarship work together to shape the way that early twentieth century literary and cultural movements are remembered today?

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

This dissertation is a collection of four research articles devoted to the study of Kummer theory for commutative algebraic groups.

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.

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.

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.