The specialisation in European Union Studies offers students an opportunity to study the processes of European integration from a multi-disciplinary perspective and combines academic excellence with practical insights into the processes of policymaking in Europe.

Area studies is an approach to knowledge that starts from the study of places in the human world from antiquity to the present, through the relevant source languages, with central regard for issues of positionality.

In our lives we often have little attention or appreciation for plants, let alone the ones we commonly call weeds. This inattention for plants has been described as plant blindness. The Stoepplantjes project aspires to decrease plant blindness by changing the image of weeds and using citizen science.…

Channi Li defended her thesis on 15 October 2019.

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Who were the main artists and producers who generated new forms of popular music? What was the music like that was produced by artists in particular urban settings? How were particular lifestyles articulated to identify new audiences and what does this reveal about the way popular music contributed…

Get the most out of your studies at Leiden University by taking part in our extracurricular activities.

Now that you are aware of the admission requirements, it's time to check the application deadlines.

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Conference

University ceremony

2021, again, sees a rich harvest of bachelor theses in Political Science. Students have been tackling fascinating subjects—ranging from European solidarity in the COVID-19 crisis to the representation of women in democratically elected parliaments—and crowning their research projects with interesting,…

Radhika Gupta has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council to study how transnational Islamic charitable networks are entangled with Western humanitarianism and neoliberal welfare frameworks.

The Rabobank has awarded Leiden University 50,000 euro for a ‘study-related' purpose. The gift is to be used to allow two African students to follow the research master’s programme in African Studies in Leiden.

Pioneering in the archaeology of Somaliland, hosting international TV and radio shows, and producing a very successful MOOC: Dr Sada Mire already has a formidable track record.

Now that it is becoming increasingly easy to digitise texts, it seems almost obvious to do that with everything that has ever been written. University lecturer Verena Meyer thinks that is too simplistic. ‘We need to look more closely at the political and cultural effects of digitisation.’

A ‘world class institute’ with a ‘vibrant atmosphere’, doing research on a continent that is ‘becoming increasingly important’. That is how Annetje Ottow, president of Leiden University’s Executive Board, described the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) on its 75th anniversary celebration on 8 September…

Discover the effects of clothing value and lifespan on buyer-user-producer relationships through collaborative research with Localising Global Garment Biographies.

Between 1993 and 2000 the Faculty of Archaeology had a formal cooperation with the Service Régional de l’Archéologie de la Guadeloupe, Direction Regional des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC) and the then director André Delpuech. During that period surveys and excavations were carried out at a number of s…

Lecture

The slogan of the Faculty of Archaeology, ‘The Future of the Past starts at Leiden University’, might sound like empty marketing speak. But there is something to it. The past can teach us a lot about climate change and that could make us fear the worst for our future. Archaeologist Gerrit Dusseldorp…

The court has dismissed Ratko Mladić’s appeal and upheld his life sentence for genocide and war crimes. The verdict is one of Yugoslavia tribunal’s last. Mission accomplished?

From one year to the next, face masks have started to appear in the environment. As the masks are discarded, they end up in the top soil, in sediment layers, and in refuse heaps. In a couple of generations archaeologists will study the layer that has already been labeled the Face Mask Horizon. Current…

The brightness peak of the ring around M87's supermassive black hole has shifted 30 degrees counterclockwise in a year. This is shown by new images released by the Event Horizon Telescope consortium.

Global Interactions is pleased to announce that we have awarded a GI Advanced Seminar grant to Dr. Mariana Francozo (Archaeology) for 'Historia Naturalis Brasiliae' and a Breed Grant for 'Global Earth Matters' to Dr. Sabine Luning (CA-DS) and Dr. Wayne Modest (RCMC)

Leiden emeritus professor George Miley receives an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin on 8 December. ‘I never dreamed that I would receive an honorary doctorate somewhere, and this is all the more emotional because it's in the city where I spent the first 21 years of my life.’

Like any language, the natural sign languages (henceforth: SLs) of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that SLs make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

Opportunities to join the initiative as a guest researcher and spend time in residence with GTGC in The Hague are available. If you are interested, we welcome you to contact us. Below you can find our current and former guest researchers.

JUSTREMIT is an ERC-funded project that brings together political theory, ethnography, and security studies in an interdisciplinary study of remittances and global justice.

AI has huge societal and economic potential and is widely used. But it also brings challenges: how do we combine human values with AI, how do we make AI more transparent and understandable, and what can AI and human cognition learn from each other, for example about language learning?

Lecture, This Time for Africa! series

Yusra Abdullahi, Maha Ali and Felipe Colla de Amorim recently joined the Institute for History as PhD candidates. Together they work an an integrated, collective project. Learn more about them below!

On 29 January 2018, the new “Arbitration of International Disputes” MOOC (massive open online course), taught by Prof. Eric De Brabandere and Dr. Giulia Pinzauti, will start on Coursera.

Lecture

On 13 November 2025, the project team and experts on insurgency and counterinsurgency across Africa and beyond came together in The Hague to discuss current trends in research on government and community responses to jihadist insurgencies in Africa.

From Persia and Arabia to North Africa: as early as the nineteenth century, there were Dutch people who used the camera themselves in various regions of the Middle East.

Peter Stevenhagen delivered daily lectures at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering in Lahore, in collaboration with ICTP, a well-known UNESCO institute in Trieste. The aim is to enhance it he knowledge of students from low- and middle-income countries. ‘By teaching here, I can truly…

A new study from Leiden researchers shows that the carbon emissions of building materials are set to grow if we do not act rapidly. Even with known interventions implemented in concert, these emissions are much larger than the remaining 1.5 degree budget for building materials at today’s share, the…

Professor Jojanneke van der Toorn has held the chair in LGBT workplace inclusion for five years. To celebrate, organised an international online conference on workplace inclusion, in cooperation with Workplace Pride that was hosted by the university on 20 and 21 May.

Costanza Franceschini discusses the Sea-ing Africa project, offering unique anthropological research opportunities in Ghana and Morocco for Masters students.

People in motion. This is the theme of the Voice4Thought festival taking place in Leiden from 21 to 25 September. Debates, songs, art, workshops, a conference for school pupils. It's all about the encounter.

Luning and Hein receiving a LUF grant to research the intricate relationship between infrastructure projects and their impact on geopolitics, economics, politics, and culture in Africa

Reseachers of the Institute of Environmental Sciences Leiden (CML) have contributed to a debate in the Journal Nature over whether lions in Africa can only be saved with dollars and fences.

Three lecturers from Leiden University have been awarded a €100,000 Comenius Teaching grant within the Senior Fellows programme. A further two lecturers have been awarded a €50,000 grant within the Teaching Fellows programme. The grants will enable the lecturers and their project teams to realise an…

What is a refugee? This question might seem easy to answer, but it is not, concludes Catherina Wilson. For 7 years she did research in The Democratic Republic of the Congo near the Ubangi river, on refugees from the Central African Republic. The research shows that among refugees there exists a wide…

Somali archaeology in Somaliland takes centre stage in a BBC World Service radio programme and a China Global Television Networks (CGTN) programme, both presented by archaeologist Sada Mire.

From 1 August 2018, Alanna O'Malley was appointed as Chair of United Nations Studies in Peace and Justice, focusing on the ‘lesser-known actors’ of the UN: women, the youth, the agents of informal diplomatic networks within the UN and actors from the Global South. This Special Chair has been created…

Diplomatic Studies (DIST) is a peer-reviewed book series that encourages original work on the theory and practice, processes and outcomes of diplomacy.

What socio-cultural transformations did indigenous communities in the Lesser Antilles undergo from the late precolonial to the early colonial period in response to Amerindian­ European-African cultural encounters? How did Amerindian populations realign themselves in response to the colonisation…