Colonial art and artefacts were not necessarily looted. Pieter ter Keurs, Professor of Museums, Collections and Society, calls for more nuance in the debate on art and collectors’ items from a loaded past. Inaugural speech on 2 December.

Over the years, many spectacular archaeological finds have been washed ashore on the Dutch coast. Among these a large assemblage of barbed points made of bone and antler from the Mesolithic (11,000-8000 BC). The species used by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to manufacture their barbed points remained…

Back in 2008, Jason Laffoon moved from Chicago to Leiden. He came to join the Faculty of Archaeology’s Caribbean research group as a PhD candidate. Now he is an assistant professor, bridging departments through his innovative research methods. ‘I focus both on the archaeology of the Americas, as well…

A number of European countries have started evacuating their citizens and there is a threat of military intervention by neighbouring countries: the situation in Niger is deteriorating rapidly. A military coup has thrown the country into turmoil, partly aided by social media.

As both old and new democracies experience increasing democratic backsliding, there is a critical societal need to rethink the design and effectiveness of democratic checks and balances. In this conference on Friday 9 June, the aim is to explore multidisciplinary insights about what makes the checks…

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.

A delegation from Leiden University is visiting Brazil from 14 to 18 March. The first day of the visit was spent with scientists in São Paolo.

The Veni grant is awarded annually by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). This year, multiple researchers from Leiden University and 2 researchers who will soon be working at the university will receive a Veni grant from the NWO. Thanks to this grant, which can amount to up to 320,000…

Robin Smith, post-doc of the 'Food Citizens?'-project wrote an interesting blog for the Leiden Anthropology blog on the basis of her previous fieldwork on the role of trust in the wine industry in Istria.

Learning to cycle without a handbrake, saying sorry if you're late for a lecture and fathoming out the weird sounds of Dutch. Leiden's new international students get a crash course in Dutch culture during their introduction week.

It is still unclear how the Neanderthals died out. For long, one theory seemed most likely: the emergence of the highly intelligent Homo sapiens, or modern humans. This competition hypothesis is no longer the dominant theory among scientists, research among archaeologists and anthropologists has shown.…

Drugs-related violence in Mexico is similar in terms of dynamics and strategy to the IS hybrid war in the West. This is the claim made by Teun Voeten. PhD defence 20 September.

A banker who puts making money second and makes a profit nonetheless. A farmer who stops ploughing and using insecticides but still has a good harvest. A new white paper by Leiden-Delft-Erasmus and Naturalis Biodiversity Center shows how the meeting of disciplines provides solutions to climate change…

At the invitation of the Centre for Early Christianity and Its Reception (CECIR), Peter Liebregts, Full Professor of Modern Literatures in English (LUCAS), visited the University of Kent in Canterbury from March 17 to 20, to give a lecture and a masterclass.

In the Humans of Humanities series, we will do a portrait of one of our researchers, staff members or students, every other week.

Here you can find answers to some frequently asked questions about the Public Administration master's programme.

Here you can find answers to some frequently asked questions about the Public Administration master's programme.

Here you can find answers to some frequently asked questions about the Public Administration master's programme.

Here you can find answers to some frequently asked questions about the Public Administration master's programme.

To increase the accuracy of climate models, it is crucial that they include past human land-use and human-driven vegetation changes. Here archaeology can make an important contribution. Current models are based on reconstructions of past vegetation. However, their accuracy is limited because it does…

The KNAW Early Career Award 2019 has been awarded to lecturer in children’s rights Stephanie Rap. She receives the award for her research into international children's rights.

It is the ninth year in a row that the Faculty of Archaeology is placed in the top ten of archaeological institutes worldwide. The QS World University Rankings by Subject looks at criteria like academic reputation and citation ratios.

Strengthening the cooperation between Moroccan, other African, and Dutch institutions for higher education. This was the focus of a two-day seminar at NIMAR (Netherlands Institute Morocco) in Rabat in July, during which scholars of the African Studies Centre Leiden interacted with colleagues from NIMAR…

On March 21 2018, a study was published in Nature, co-authored by Professor M. Soressi from the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University, announcing the sequencing of five new Neandertals, raising the number of high-coverage sequenced Neandertals from two to seven. A tooth lost by a Neandertal woman…

Fieldwork photographs of Meike de Goede, Catherina Wilson and Mirjam de Bruijn (with African Studies student Vera Bakker) have been selected for the LeidenGlobal Photo Exhibition Heritage on the Move, which will travel around the different Faculties of the University in the coming months.

'There are far too few networking events for young scholars, even though they are eager to attend them;' states Judi Mesman, Dean of Leiden University College (LUC). On Wednesday 7 March, Judi Mesman organised the 'Interdisciplinary Networking Event for Young Scholars', a networking event specifically…

Jan Erk, political scientist at Leiden University, has been selected as the 2016-2017 Smuts Memorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge. During his residency at the renowned British academy, he will work on his research project ‘The Enduring Impact of Africa’s extinct kingdoms and invisible chief…

Last week an audit committee from the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) visited the Wijnhaven building at Campus The Hague to review the proposed new English-taught master’s degree programme ‘Law & Society: Governance and Global Development’.

It is the eighth year in a row that the Faculty of Archaeology is placed in the top ten of archaeological institutes worldwide. The QS World University Rankings by Subject looks at criteria like academic reputation and citation ratios.

Professor of Law and Society Maartje van der Woude has been appointed as a Mercator Fellow at the University of Göttingen’s research group Mobility Rights in the Global Context of Multiple Crises, which studies human rights and migration in times of crisis.

Professor Henk Schulte Nordholt was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion on Friday 6 September 2019 for his services to the study of Indonesia. Mayor of Leiden, Henri Lenferink, presented him with his medal. This was at the end of a valedictory symposium for and a valedictory speech by…

On February 28th of this year Dr. Andrzej Tadeusz Antczak died of cancer after a long battle. Until his retirement in 2023 Andrzej was attached to the Faculty of Archaeology as an Associate Professor in Caribbean Archaeology. From 2017 until 2020 he was the Head of the Department of World Archaeology,…

The first settlers of the Caribbean have long been regarded as bands of highly mobile groups who subsisted exclusively by hunting, gathering, and fishing. In recent years, however, there has been increasing evidence for the cultivation of domesticated plants by early groups and a lower degree of mobility…

Conference

The Faculty of Archaeology proudly presents the research brochure Perspectives on the Past, featuring passionate, dedicated researchers introducing a dazzling scala of research topics: from present-day traditional knowledge in Africa to the power of glue in Palaeolithic Europe. In addition to these…

Provenance and distribution of raw materials

The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) is hosting an international conference on November 29 and 30 at Gravensteen on the role and position of sounds and sounding arts in public urban environments. This unique conference aims to increase the attention to the role of the sound, sound design,…

Anthropological Research on Solidarity Economy in Croatia: the case of CSA.

On 11 January 2022, the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences opened the new year during a livestreamed reception. Dean Paul Wouters and Executive Director of Studies Kristiaan van der Heijden were the hosts. After several faculty prizes were awarded, our Dean expressed a new year’s resolution…

In 2019 the ENIS Spring School takes place in Granada from 18 March until 22 March 2019. The Spring School will be organized by ENIS (the European Network for Islamic Studies), consisting of: CNMS (Marburg University), CSIC (Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and Escuela de Estudios…

On November 25, Dr Araceli Rojas presented her book El tiempo y la sabiduría: un calendario sagrado entre los ayöök de Oaxaca. The event took place in the Central Public Library of the State of Oaxaca, in the heart of Oaxaca City, at 7 pm.

The biweekly Lunch Time Seminar is an online only event, but it is not publicly accessible in real-time. If you would like to attend one of the upcoming sessions, please send an email to sails@liacs.leidenuniv.nl.

On January 28 and 29, 2021 the conference ‘Imperial Artefacts: History, Law and the Looting of Cultural Property’ took place online. This first of its kind event at Leiden University was an interdisciplinary online conference and brought together (post-)colonial historians, legal historians, curators,…

Les Cottés is one the rare site in western Europe with occupations in sequence by the very last Neandertals and the first anatomically modern humans.

This programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell.