What if seriously ill patients do not want to hear their diagnosis? Does a clinician always need to provide a patient with all available information? Communication researcher Liesbeth van Vliet, medical anthropologist Annemarie Samuels and research intern Fiona Brosig will put these questions on open…

Who was professionally involved in language between 1550 and 1650? And what were the financial returns of this language sector? Assistant Professor Alisa van de Haar has received an ERC Starting Grant to map out the situation in Northwest Europe between 1550 and 1650.

Leiden University researchers have discovered by chance a note from 1783 in Papiamento. They are working on a linguistic study on confiscated Dutch letters. The ‘Letters as loot’ project is headed by Professor Marijke van der Wal.

Professor Pieter ter Keurs has spent his entire career studying collecting. Now, he is retiring. ‘I hope the focus on collections will carry on.’

Museums have long focused on power, wealth and a few famous figures. But that is changing, says Valika Smeulders, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum. What this change comprises and how it has come about is the subject of her keynote speech at the D&I Symposium on 11 January.

On 1 September, Ad Maas, curator of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, was appointed professor by special appointment. In this role, he will primarily focus on the representation of natural sciences in museums.

In January, Dr Karsten Lambers was appointed as Professor of Digital and Computational Archaeology at Leiden University's Faculty of Archaeology. With his extensive background in both archaeological research and computational sciences, the installation of Professor Lambers further strengthens this discipline…

An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore. Archaeologist Alex Brandsen has now used deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to develop a search engine…

The objectives of the 2011 campaign Tell Balata Archaeological Park are to carry out excavations, promotion and awareness, community involvement, gathering oral histories and educating children. The objectives are described in a handout produced for the opening ceremony on June 21st 2011.

Mirjam de Bruijn and camerman Sjoerd Sijsma have been travelling through Chad and Cameroon. The Arab spring hasn't arrived there yet, but the effects of internet and mobile telephony show in everyday life. Mirjam and Sjoerd look for counter voices: young people who try to change these countries in their…

Lecture, China Seminar

Various researchers from Leiden University have been awarded NWO (Dutch Research Council) Open Competition funding. Nine social sciences and humanities projects will receive the funding.

Picnic

Lecture

Conference

With the exodus of departing parliamentarians, which seems to have gained momentum this summer, the loss of experience in parliament after the upcoming general election in the Netherlands will be considerable. A cause for concern according to Wim van De Camp, former CDA MP, and Wim Voermans, Professor…

Our event on the fourth and fifth of September 2019 at the Alden Biesen castle was a succes! We captivated the attendees with informal learning in the heritage sector and where the BADGES toolbox was introduced

With his master's thesis 'The patriot behind the pot' Wytze Stellingwerf reached second place, among 38 contestants, in the IISG Thesis Award 2017.

The Department of History and Art History externe link at Utrecht University is looking for a candidate for the PhD-project “The (R)evolution of Reconstruction: an analysis of digital facsimiles”. This project analyses the value of digital facsimiles for researchers, heritage institutions, and museum…

Apps that can precisely identify shards, coins or heel bones: archaeology has embraced artificial intelligence. Alex Brandsen is working on a search engine that scans vast quantities of text from an archaeological viewpoint.

During the Interpret Europe Conference 2016 in Mechelen, the workshop Quality Criteria and Success Factors for Heritage Interpretation was held by the Swedish Centre for Nature Interpretation’s Per Sonnvik and Lena Malmström as part of the conference’s InHerit strand.

Geoglyphs decorate the ground near the town of Boha, India, and add up a total distance of about 30 miles. They were discovered by Carlo and Yohann Oetheimer. Our Assistant Professor Karsten Lambers was asked to respond by Vice.

Many of our staff and students have won an award, received a grant, obtained an academic fellowship for their quality or have been socially engaged due to their specific expertise. See below for an overview per year.

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

The Leiden Research Profile Area Political Legitimacy organizes a public symposium on the 12th of May 2016 on the legitimacy and future of the Dutch Senate.

Together with LOVA (Association for Feminist Anthropology), Jasmijn Rana organized the seminar ‘Gender Moves on May 10, 2019. This seminar explored how gender is enacted and reproduced in movement and how gendered movement contributes to dismantling and/or reinforcing ideas and norms about gender the…

Episodes 40 and 42 of the podcast Everyday Runners by Andy Fuller and Reading Sideways Press, feature a conversation with Jasmijn Rana, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of Development.

The problem of unequal sports participation will only be addressed if sexism and racism in recreational sports and exercise are taken seriously. That's what cultural anthropologists Jasmijn Rana (Leiden University) and Kathrine van den Bogert (Utrecht University) write in an opinion piece in the Dutch…

Lecture, Book Launch

Indigenous philosophies have been ignored for too long. This prompted Osiris González Romero to study the wisdom of the Nahua in Mexico. Their philosophy has an important message for the consumption society: see the earth and nature as living beings and not just as resources. PhD defence 22 June.

Ustadh Mau Digital Archive project (UMADA) is among the UCLA Library 29 international cultural preservation projects supported by the Modern Endagered Archive Program (Cohort 3). From the 3rd up to the 5th of October, a digitization training workshop took place on Lamu island, on the so-called northern…

Why and how do people collect things? Why does a museum display one object and not another? These questions are at the heart of the interdisciplinary research programme Museums, Collections and Society. The programme is holding a conference for scholars and the general public on 5 and 6 July.

The Leiden municipality wants to make the city centre climate-proof and combat heat stress by greening it. But they want to do this in a way that does justice to the city’s heritage. Researcher Fenna IJtsma delves into historical greenery to offer inspiration.

Conference

Lecture

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

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.

Conference

In 2005 Leiden's municipal archaeologists excavated a 2,700-year-old canoe dug out from a tree trunk. Researchers from Material Culture Studies are now building a reproduction of this vessel using replicas of Iron Age tools. The researchers are hoping to gain a better understanding of the building p…

The research article ‘Anatomy of a notch. An in-depth experimental investigation and interpretation of combat traces on Bronze Age swords’ is one of the most downloaded articles on the Journal of Archaeological Science website. This journal is one of the best for impact factor in the field. The article,…

After 30 days of work, the experimental reconstruction of the iron age canoe of Vlaardingen Vergulde Hand is finished! Its maiden voyage will take place on Friday the 16th of February when it will be paddled for the first time by schoolchildren from Vlaardingen.

Sara Polak, PhD researcher and lecturer at LUCAS, has won a Fulbright scholarship to work on her research on Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yale University from September 2014 till February 2015.

Amerindian settlement patterns and early colonial cartography in Northern Hispaniola

How to contribute to Inter-Section? What does the process look like? We have answered the most frequently asked questions.

The project seeks to come to an understanding of the archaeology of the desert and the ways in which its inhabitants engaged with their constraint, marginal environments through time. It compares and interprets site distribution and community organisation over a long time scale and across several different…

This one-year master's programme explores the political and cultural evolution of the world from a long-term, and broad comparative perspective. This creates a better understanding of the entangled nature of today's society.