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.

‘Realising we have shared ancestors and that our past is dynamic makes us more accepting of others.’ Sada Mire is an archaeologist at Leiden University and a former refugee – she fled from the civil war in Somalia. At the HagueTalks night during the Just Peace Festival, she will share her thoughts on…

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to French writer Annie Ernaux (1940). In an explanation, the Swedish Academy praises Ernaux 'for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory'.

As of February, Pepijn Reeser steps down as the project director of the Taalmuseum (the Language Museum). Exhibition designer and project manager Tessa Askamp takes over his role.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has granted health psychologist Andrea Evers a visiting professorship funding for Luana Colloca. This funding is linked to the KNAW’s Visiting Professors Programme which enables outstanding foreign researchers to spend time working in the Netherlands.…

The first results of the “Policing European Metropolises project” (PEMP) that associate Professor Elke Devroe and Professor P. Ponsaers launched in April 2013 are now published. Having been the referent for The Netherlands and Belgium in the Urbis project (Leonardo programme), the project focuses on…

Conference

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.

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,…

On Thursday 26 June 2025, the Pavilion of the Wereldmuseum Leiden featured the first joint meeting of Leiden University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam around the shared research theme Collecting Global Heritage. Some 50 researchers, students and collection managers came together to share knowledge,…

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…

Getting young people excited about history is quite possible without books. Researchers from Leiden travelled to Morocco to work with schoolchildren on reconstructing cultural heritage in the popular video game Minecraft. The result: one virtual 14th-century city gate – and 20 teens with a greater appreciation…

Archaeologist Annelou van Gijn received an NWO Archeologie Telt grant to investigate domestic craft and subsistence activities of late Neolithic peoples in the coastal area of the Netherlands

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.

This year professor emeritus Old Chinese Literature Wilt Idema receives the Special Book Award of China. The Chinese government awards this prize to translators, writers and editors with great services to China.

What can papyri teach us about antiquity? Students of papyrology in Leiden try to answer questions about life in antiquity aided by papyri from our collection.

Lecture, Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series

The Faculty of Archaeology experiments with innovating their teaching methods, using 3D scans and visualisation technology to enable active learning. 'It makes archaeological material more accessible. Especially when it comes to fragile materials, it allows nearly anybody to analyse them.'

Two researchers from the Faculty of Archaeology have received a grant from the Museums, Collections and Society (MSC) interdisciplinary programme. This grant is for collection-based research. Jason Laffoon is using his grant for research into the origins of Central American turquoise, while Dr Marike…

For the third year in a row, the bonfires in the Duindorp and Scheveningen neighbourhoods in The Hague during New Year's Eve have been cancelled. According to Professor Henk te Velde, the fight for the bonfires represents something bigger: angry citizens.

After a first successful pilot of the The Hague Southwest Thesis Project a second cohort of students will start this year. The kick-off meeting for this takes place on Thursday 24 March from 15:00-17:00, STEK Shalom Kerk, Vrederustlaan 96, Den Haag.

Translating ancient texts, filling in missing parts of clay tablets: articles are popping up more and more often about the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence for researching documents in the oldest scripts. Are we better off leaving the deciphering of ancient texts to computers from now…

On 8 May, the memoirs of Jang Jin-sung are appearing worldwide under the title Dear Leader. Jan Jin-sung was a member of the personal circle of the former North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. Dear Leader provides a radically different perspective on the workings of the regime, as it reveals the moving…

By making smart use of available data, the health and care of people can be substantially improved. Marco Spruit wants to use language and machine learning in the coming years to identify and solve the biggest care issues in the region of The Hague. He has been appointed Professor of Advanced Data Science…

What is the name of the medieval Persian poet Nezami (✞ ca. 1209) doing on the cover of an Eric Clapton rock album? Asghar Seyed Gohrab, associate professor at the Institute for Area Studies, talks about it in a new blog for the Leiden Medievalists Blog.

At the end of May, the Leiden English Language and Culture Programme, formerly known as the Department of English Language and Literature, celebrated its 75th anniversary (starting from the appointment of the first professor of English Studies). Over 220 alumni, staff present and past, and students…

For all the artworks that Riccardo Giacconi creates, he begins by conducting extensive research. He discovered three stories about rebellious characters that were transmitted through unofficial channels: as characters in puppet shows or in folk tales. He translated the three stories into three cycles…

Researchers in Bilthoven, The Netherlands, have recently unraveled the defense against whooping cough bacteria in unprecedented detail. The outcome of the project, conducted at Intravacc (Institute for Translational Vaccinology) in Bilthoven, provides opportunities for a new approach in the development…

Peter Buwalda will join Leiden University as the new writer-in-residence from autumn 2026. Buwalda will contribute to the new Writing minor offered by the bachelor’s programme in Dutch Language and Culture.

The production of history is a process of power. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where during both the colonial and the post-colonial era history has been written by hegemonic regimes. This historiography has in turn (re-)produced structures of domination, social exclusion and division.…

In early modern England, courts of law were working overtime. University lecturer Lotte Fikkers delved into the records of centuries-old court cases involving women. In Early Modern Women's Life-Writing and English Law, she reconstructs how the story they told in court differs from the one they wrote…

Marleen Hogendoorn (36) studied Dutch Language and Culture at Leiden University and is now editor-in-chief of the feminist monthly OPZIJ.

Raymond Corbey holds a chair in both Philosophy of Science and Anthropology at the Faculty of Archaeology, to which he has been attached since 1993. The faculty’s 'embedded philosopher', as Dean Kolen likes to call him, is hard to pin down in terms of the usual specialties at the faculty because of…

Lecture

Lecture, CMGI Brown Bag Seminar

Between 11 and 13 September 2025, the ESIL Annual Conference took place in Berlin, Germany. This year's conference unfolded on the theme 'Reconstructing International Law', attracting an unprecedented number of legal scholars from all over the world.

Roman philosopher and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is still used as an intellectual example by politicians and speech writers today. But, he did not go unchallenged in his own day, as a statesman in particular. Classicist Leanne Jansen conducted research into how classical historians judged Cicero’s…

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.

Materials like concrete, steel, plastic and fertiliser shape the world around us, but they’re also extremely polluting. If we want to build a more sustainable society, we can learn a lot from archeologists. How do we relate to these materials? And are there alternatives? Maikel Kuijpers is writing a…

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

In an article by the New York Times, cultural heritage law specialist Evelien Campfens discusses the difficulties surrounding the ownership of looted art.

In this new edition of the Rijmbijbel there are 159 valuable miniatures, combined with commentary by MA-students from Utrecht. Students in Dutch Language at the universities of Antwerp and Leiden have translated the text passages. Various experts, such as Martine Meuwese (UU), tell more about Jacob…

This is a recording of the book launch of Susanna Lindberg's

A conversation about expanding the disciplinary boundaries of the study and teaching of pre-modern English literature, on the occasion of the publication of Sjoerd Levelt’s The Middle Dutch Brut: An Edition and Translation. With: Shamma Boyarin (University of Victoria), Shazia Jagot (University of York),…

On 10-12 October 2024, a workshop is held at the University of Groningen, titled: "25 years after Hillenbrand: New Approaches to Sources, Translation and Perspectives". The organisers aim to gather specialists and early career researchers in the field of crusader studies to discuss emerging research…