Dive into the CJEU’s recent judgment in Case C-356/21 on non-discrimination from three unique perspectives on the 16 February at 17.00 hrs. Abogada Rosa Oyarzabal, Professor Christa Tobler, and Dr Olga Ceran will give you an insider’s view of the case in its legal and national context.

Psychologist Omar Burhan discovered in his study of nepotism that the hiring of kin, even if they are competent for the job, makes people feel they are procedurally being treated unfairly. However, certain people are liable to believe that effective leaders transfer their traits to their offspring.…

The 289 students who recently moved into the tower on Kolffpad at the Leiden Bio Science Park are sitting pretty. A self-contained unit in the middle of the campus yet surrounded by green, with a launderette, games room and study area on the ground floor, and, coming soon, a branch of Coffee Star.

Students are ever more cautious to express their view on controversial debates. The new student-led D&I initiative at the Faculty of Humanities, COOP, is ready to step in. They organise sessions to guide students on speaking up and respecting the views of others at university.

The logo of Leiden University, with letters as small as a bacterium. Researchers from LUMC and the Institute of Biology have created the smallest logo of our university ever produced. It is a piece of fun with a serious real-world application: the new microscope with which the logo was made allows scientists…

Elena Maria Rossi is fascinated by black holes. Her appointment as a professor was a long-held wish, partly because there are so few female professors in her field. ‘My appointment is also a milestone for the Leiden Observatory.’

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

On 7 December, Meghan Ingram won the Jaap Doek Children’s Rights Thesis Award 2021 for her thesis on the rights of children of foreign terrorist fighters held in Syria. The prize for the best master’s thesis in the field of children’s rights is awarded every year by Defence for Children and the Department…

Many members of Chicago's P'urhepecha community did not even know they lived a stone’s throw from some of their own historical heritage. Researcher Kate Bellamy organised a meeting to introduce them to books hundreds of years old.

All supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies appear to have periods when they swallow matter from their close surroundings. But that is about as far as the similarities go. That's the conclusion reached by British and Dutch astronomers from their research with ultra-sensitive radio telescopes…

As of 1 September , Karel Berkhoff has been appointed professor by special appointment in Ukrainian History. In this position, made possible in part by the KNAW, he will focus primarily on dark moments in recent Ukrainian history: the persecutions that have taken place in the first half of the twentieth…

Three new PhD candidates at the Faculty of Humanities will receive funding from the Programme Office Sustainable Humanities and NWO. The aim of the grant is to boost young talent within the humanities.

Long into the 19th century, seascapes were considered an expression of patriotism. Artists who painted in a 17th century style were valued more. This tradition stifled innovation in the genre, Cécile Bosman has concluded. She will defend her PhD thesis on 13 October.

Six students of archaeology, history and art history are to follow the Silk Route in Central Asia, looking for evidence from ancient history for the enormous cultural exchange brought about by this trade route. They are conducting their research for the exhibition on the Silk Route that opened in the…

It is difficult to imagine a society other than a hierarchical nation-state. This is in part because we neglect alternative forms from the past, argues archaeologist Lewis Borck in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology.

Hoe kan het dat universele mensenrechten wereldwijd niet hetzelfde in de praktijk worden gebracht?

The Bolivian people will make their opinion known on a change to the constitution in a referendum on 21 February. Leiden University organised a symposium on the referendum on 11 February. The aim of the change is to allow President Evo Morales to remain in power until 2025.

On 10 May 2021, Melanie Fink and Barbora Budinská published their views on recent developments in the areas of EU regulation of Artificial Intelligence and the Banking Union respectively as Op-Eds on EU Law Live.

Thursday afternoon 31 May the Public Leadership Challenge took place in the Living Lab, of Leiden University The Hague. During this afternoon a diverse group of professionals, academics and students focused on the challenge of autonomy in the digital society. Working together on this complex and interesting…

PhD candidate Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart has received the Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds grant from the Leids Universiteits Fonds (LUF) to work on a research project focusing on the landscapes of the Second World War. ‘We will combine citizen science with deep learning to uncover traces of the c…

The Leiden Summer School in Language and Linguistics is visited every year by many scholars worldwide. Four of the 120 participants of the 7th Summer School in 2012, share their view of Leiden.

Almost 4400 anatomical drawings from the collections of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) are now available through Europeana. The collection shows medical art on paper from the early eighteenth century to the present day. Most of the drawings were created in or around the Leiden University Medical…

Writer in residence Ronald Giphart will explore a number of his own fascinations with Leiden students.

Castles, monasteries and bridges, but also city profiles, history prints and water management works. Leiden University Libraries (UBL) manages one of the most important collections of topographical images in the Netherlands. The collection, bequested to UBL by Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis (1797-1872)…

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

Tinh Le (PhD at ICLON) researched the impact of confucian culture and socialist beliefs on stakeholders' beliefs about democratic education and its implementation in Vietnamese secondary schools. Defence on 29 November.

On 16 September, the Rapenburg canal will be the setting for the Night of Art & Sciences. There will be plenty of things to do, including for international students and staff. We have selected four great acts in advance.

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

An international team of astronomers from Leiden Observatory and others, has for the first time mapped a piece of the dark, cosmic web. The research strengthens the hypothesis that the young universe consisted of huge numbers of small groups of newly formed stars. The astronomers publish their findings…

Welcome to the WIIS NL community! We are excited to be launching our newsletter in the week we celebrate International Women's Day.

In 2022, for one year, Leiden will be European City of Science. For humanities scholars, this offers enormous opportunities to bring their work to the attention of citizens. Rob Zwijnenberg, chairman of the steering committee that coordinates the faculty's contributions, talks about these opportunit…

In January 2020, Dr Min Jung Cho and Dr Annie Trevenen-Jones of LUC The Hague applied for the LUF - SVM (Stichting Verpakking en Milieu/ Foundation for Packaging and the Environment) grant. In June 2020 they were awarded a grant amounting to the sum of €75,000.

Experts from several disciplines have raised concerns about the use of seemingly precise models to guide policies in matters as complex as the current Covid-19 pandemic. 22 scholars wrote down five principles on how to responsibly use scientific models. This comment was published in Nature on 24 June…

Staring into the clouds hoping for a glimpse of the sun, cheering in encouragement, video recordings: there was no shortage of things to do at the Leiden Observatory. More than 600 visitors witnessed the last, almost complete solar eclipse of the decade..

A few weeks ago, Dutch pension giant ABP decided to divest from fossil fuels. But is this actually going to help the climate? Natascha van der Zwan, Arjen van der Heide and Philipp Golka (Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University) address this question in our new article for S&D.

It was with deep sorrow that we learned of the sudden death of our dear colleague Menno Tuurenhout on 7 December 2020.

Silver jewellery, sculptures made of cork and intriguing photos of psychiatrists' treatment rooms. Staff at Leiden University exhibit their artworks in the Old Library. The summer exhibition can be viewed until 12 August.

To truly understand Dutch literature, we have to look beyond borders. At least, that is the view of Sander Bax. From 1 August, he will be Professor of Contemporary Dutch Literature and Culture in a Transnational Dynamic.

Three cybersecurity consortia that Leiden University is part of have been awarded subsidies of over a million euros by NWO. Leiden is the coordinator for two of the projects.

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

Manuscripts that look like a comic book, that's how you could describe the manuscripts of the Dongba people from China. The manuscripts are one of the last examples of a so-called pictographic script that can only be interpreted by Dongba priests, shamans, who have knowledge of the ancient Dongba cu…

Too expensive groceries, diseases suddenly breaking out: from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, hundreds of people documented the world around them in chronicles. A significant number of these texts have been digitised in recent years. Professor of Early Modern Dutch History and project leader…

Why does it turn out to be so complicated to solve sustainability issues if everyone ‘knows’ about these problems? This was the central question in a masterclass on Sustainability for alumni provided by Leiden scientists active in public administration and environmental sciences.

Educators in European science museums sometimes think rather differently about the definition of an 'authentic' object. They think carefully about how they present those objects to teach visitors something or make them curious. This was shown in research by the Science Communication & Society department.…

In this article we share the experiences of a student who used Siggie for Students. The online coaching platform for students that is paid for students at FGGA. Find out if Siggie can be of help to you too.

Young people being deployed to carry out explosive attacks: how do they come into view, and what motivates them? The podcast 'Action/Reaction: From Attack to Approach' by the research project Close Protection and Surveillance and researcher Sheila Adjiembaks takes a closer look at why and how young…

How did the medieval manuscript develop as a physical object during the Twelfth Century Renaissance and what do these changes tell us about the intellectual culture of the period?

On 17 October, a representative from the ERC Safe & Sound project attended the first edition of WE ROBOT Europe in Berlin. At the conference, speakers and participants from the academic world, policy bodies and industry shared and discussed their thoughts on robotics regulation in the EU and the US.…