Professor Joanita Vroom, together with the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) offered the course Byzantine Rome in September 2023. The course, co-taught by Vroom, Letty ten Harkel and various guest lecturers, investigated the transition of the city of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,…

Alireza Mashaghi from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) will use state-of-the-art technology to investigate proteins that play a role in muscular dystrophy. His goal is to provide new insights for designing novel therapeutic strategies in the future. To accomplish this, Mashaghi receives…

Last year around 2,000 international students started a master’s degree at Leiden University. To make this possible, there are various grants that these students can apply for. One such grant is the LExS: the Leiden University Excellence Scholarship Programme. Three LExS students tell us about their…

How are supermassive black holes born? That is the question astronomer Elena Maria Rossi is trying to answer. But how do you investigate something you cannot see?

Are you interested in ancient Egypt, the rich cultural heritage of Mesopotamia or bliblical Hebrew and Aramaic? Students of all faculties can follow electives of Ancient Near Eastern Studies without prior knowledge or special entry requirements. Archaeology student Annely Arends talks about her expe…

For the first time, a group of international and interdisciplinary researchers led by Karline Janmaat and her former MSc Student Chirag Chittar, have tested the several hypotheses on music simultaneously in a modern foraging society during their daily search for tubers – their staple food.

In tracing intra-site, local and regional craft networks in Late Bronze Age Tiryns (Greece) the project aimed to understand technological changes, (dis)continuities and social practices from the Late Palatial until the Post Palatial periods in Mycenaean Greece.

Students at Leiden University believe that their degree programmes should focus more on sustainability. These are the findings of a survey of more than 550 students by Leiden University Green Office.

Hosted at the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) in Rabat on 26 and 27 October, 20 junior and senior empirical researchers who all work on migration in Morocco came together to discuss two important topics that are frequently neglected in migration scholarship. The researchers were from different…

Fishes rely heavily on sound to find their way during migration or dispersal. Many species are affected by noise pollution. Hans Slabbekoorn from the Institute of Biology Leiden received a HORIZON2020 grant of 500,000 euros to study the impact of sound conditions on movement decisions of fishes.

Dr. Simon Willmetts from the University of Leiden’s Institute for Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) has been selected for a stay at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) in Amsterdam.

The aim of the project is two-fold: first, to further scholarly understanding of the human dynamics that shaped the growth of Dorestad in a broader, international context; and second, to test the potential of multi-isotopic analyses on an early medieval Dutch assemblage.

In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature…

Leiden University 2016 thesis awards were awarded to Kaspar Pucek (History), Mariska Meijer (Bio Medical Sciences) and Paul Kozowyk (Archaeology).

After a year of hard work, the second class of students of the Master of Laws: Advanced Studies in International Children’s Rights received their well-deserved master diplomas on Monday 28 August.

After a year of hard work, the first class of students from the Master of Laws: Advanced Studies in International Children’s Rights received their well-deserved master diplomas on Monday 29 August.

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.

Lecture, Workshop and Egeria Lecture

Conference

Over the past few months, Urban Studies students have been helping to think about the realisation of the Humanities Campus. To test their knowledge in practice, the future urban specialists gave advice on several different aspects, including thermal energy storage and the new central campus building…

Every year the newly arriving Archaeology students are invited to join an active introduction day during which they get to know the Faculty and each other in a playful and fun way. The activities are organised by Study Adviser Cleody van der Eijk. ‘It helps people to loosen up and get to know each o…

On September 20, the Austria Centre Leiden and the Leiden Jewish Studies Association convened a panel to celebrate the launch of Prof. dr. Sarah A. Cramsey’s new book Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946.

Staff from Leiden University are starting the Dutch universities’ staggered strike against the government cuts on 10 March. Follow the strike in this liveblog.

In the journal series European Drama and Performance Studies, Jed Wentz has edited issue n° 19 - Historical Acting Techniques and the 21st-Century Body.

When Floris Harm took up his role as director of the Leiden Asia Centre, he made a remarkable discovery on the university website. It turned out that a past family member was one of Leiden University’s first sinologists.

Humans are increasingly losing agency on social media. A team of legal scholars from Leiden University, computer scientists from other universities and civil society organisations, is conducting a study into the balance of power between Big Tech and users.

The project’s overall goal is to improve Indonesia’s environmental legal framework and its implementation by strengthening the regulatory capacity of the government, and by enhancing the capacity of CSOs and scholars to hold the government accountable for its regulatory performance.

In the Pioneers of Leiden University series we talk to past and present students who were the first in their families to go to university. In this third instalment we talk to Jos Schaeken (1962) dean of the Honours Academy and Professor of Slavic and Baltic languages and Cultural History: 'I had to…

Too often, tax scholars have a dual role: advising the government on legislation, while at the same time helping companies to pay as little tax as possible. This needs to change according to Bart Snels, a member of parliament for Dutch GreenLeft party.

The Research Catalogue (RC) is a searchable database for archiving artistic research. It comprises an open source, online, collaborative workspace application for the archiving, designing and publishing of artistic research.

Last month, with the help of the advisory groups the D&I Calendar was launched for the Faculty of Humanities. The calendar serves as a tool to create awareness about important dates related to diversity and inclusion and their potential impact on work and study.

Lecture, Opening of the Owada Chair

Introducing the team's work on Comparison

Climate change, depletion of natural resources, loss of natural and cultural landscapes, and many other (ecological) sustainability challenges urge us to (re)evaluate human interaction with the natural world. This renewed environmental consciousness has invigorated not only scientists working on effects…

On Tuesday November 25, 2025, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey travelled with students from her masters seminar on “New Approached to the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe” taught at the History Institute to Amsterdam for a unique opportunity. There, Ms. Lotte Sophie Groenendijk, an alum of the History…

Lecture, Roundtable

Cutting down global emissions of greenhouse gases to combat global warming won’t do the trick alone: we also need negative-emissions technology that can capture carbon dioxide directly out of the air. In the prestigious journal Global Environmental Change, PhD candidate Oscar Rueda and colleagues shed…

Stephan Raaijmakers has been Professor of Communicative AI since 1 May. Prior to this, he had held this position for five years as professor by special appointment. How has his approach to AI changed in that time?

Koen Keijzer combined three mathematical models into one unified system capable of making meaningful predictions about how cells form blood vessels. This helps biologists studying the chaotic, leaky blood vessels found in and around tumours.

On 8 September the students of the European Law Master gathered in the Lorentzzaal for the festive opening of their programme.

Giulio Barbero and Matthias Müller-Brockhausen did their PhD research at the Leiden University Game Research Lab.

University ceremony

On Wednesday, 30 August 2023, the graduation ceremony took place in Leiden University’s Academy Building. The ceremony was a momentous occasion, attended by distinguished guests, faculty members, and the proud families and friends of the graduates. The event celebrated the hard work, dedication, and…

This handbook is aimed at a wide readership interested in developing an understanding of the political, economic, and social complexity of Eastern Europe. It covers Central Europe, the Baltic republics, South Eastern Europe, and the Western Balkans, as well as all the countries of the former Soviet…

Lecture

Subproject of

Iraqi-Kurdish student of Middle Eastern Studies Bareez Majid has been nominated for the ECHO Award. ‘She has a strong personality, though she may appear unassuming at first,’ was the comment from one of her lecturers.

The WARN project seeks to understand why certain warnings fail to reach and impact decision makers in time to avert crisis.

How can we promote more durable solutions to protracted refugee situations and which roles can connectivity and mobility of displaced people play to improve protection and resilience?