Laughing, crying or even having a moan together: close friends are worth their weight in gold in good and bad times. Researcher Lisa Schreuders explains the effects on body and mind. Can we give that magical click a helping hand? And what advice does she have for first-years in their new city?

Theoretical research does not always give us the right solution to a problem in society. This message, loud and clear, is delivered during the final presentations of the Master Honours Class 'Social Innovation in Action'.

The first block is almost over and that means you will soon be able to evaluate the courses you attended.

As of November 1st 2019, Sybille Lammes, Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, will be the new academic director of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). She succeeds Anthonya Visser, who has been the institute's academic director since 2014. It is a three year-long appointment.…

Which consumer groups post the greatest cost to public health and the planet through their food choices, and how can we use this fine-scale information to accelerate a sustainable dietary transition?

How to get a PhD position is clouded in mystery. In one afternoon, Peter van der Putten and Maarten Lamers talk about how (they think) the game is played.

Hanne Cuyckens, Michiel Dam, Anja van der Voort, Daan Weggemans and Paul Gobée have joined the Leiden University Teachers’ Academy. Lecturers from the academy can exchange experiences, develop themselves and share their knowledge and expertise with the rest of the university, for example through the…

Proteins organize themselves around our body cells through a self-induced force. They indent the cell membrane, which makes them roll towards each other. This discovery provides new insights into processes like nutritional uptake and brain signaling, as well as into such diseases as Alzheimer’s. Publication…

A plant that takes metal from the ground all by itself: a natural way to mine or to clean the soil. PhD student Roderick Bouman (Hortus Botanicus Leiden) described a new plant species from Sabah, Borneo, which can be used to extract nickel. In an open access article in Botanical studies, he and the…

At the end of October, the Steering Committee, headed by Dean Mark Rutgers, gave the green light for the development of the new Faculty Strategic Plan for 2021-2026. How does this process go?

The Executive Board of Leiden University has appointed the new Board for the Faculty of Archaeology. Read more about their plans for the future of the Faculty.

A new executive board has been installed at NeCEN, a state-of-the art facility that offers the most advanced cryo-electron microscopes worldwide. The new board members are full of excitement: what are their ideas for the future of the facility?

Kajsa Ollongren, Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, opened a complex of 467 student flats in Leiden on 26 August. This is the (Y)ours development on the sustainable ‘Leidse Schans’ campus at Lammenschans train station.

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century.

On September 1 2017, Marlou Grobben ends her term as assessor of the faculty board of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. After a two- year period, having represented the student- interests within the faculty board, the position is transferred to Esmee Braam.

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.

There is much wrong with the taxonomy of the plant genus Phyllanthus. Roderick Bouman of the Hortus botanicus Leiden has developed a new phylogeny for Phyllanthus and exposes the evolution of the plant genus. Publication in TAXON.

How will future technological developments influence our everyday lives? This is the key question during the Brave New World symposium on 2 and 3 November.

Plants are able to resist a pathogen’s attack by a dual innate immune system. The relationship between the two pathways was not clear, but it turns out that they mutually potentiate each other, as assistant professor Pingtao Ding (Institute of Biology Leiden) and colleagues (The Sainsbury Laboratory,…

Cookware handles, electrical plugs, brake pads. Unlike other plastics, these ‘thermosets’ cannot simply be melted down and reshaped, making them difficult to recycle. Chemist Roxanne Kieltyka and her team are now exploring a way to make these materials recyclable, potentially transforming the way we…

From deepfakes and disinformation to killer robots, surgical robots and AI lawmaking: AI (Artificial Intelligence) is changing our world. That raises the question whether this requires some form of regulation. At eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University, prof. Bart Custers…

How to deal with the most challenging design question of your life: what do I want to be when I grow up? The ‘Designing Your Life’ method teaches students how to craft their own future. The project will start next academic year, thanks to a Comenius grant. ‘Everyone interested should be able to borrow…

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

This book surveys a distinct human phenomenon in the history of the ancient Near East: individuals who were born males but, under various social and historical circumstances, their masculine identity was considered ambiguous. They bore specific titles and were engaged in cult or palace administration.…

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is one of seven institutes housed within the Faculty of Humanities.

This two-year master’s programme in Philosophy of the Arts combines in-depth philosophical training in continental philosophy and aesthetics with the academic study of one or more arts, such as visual, musical, literary, and performing arts. Of the 120 EC of the programme, 40 EC will be taken in a discipline…

Italian Language and Linguistics at Leiden University draws on diachronic and synchronic perspectives to bring you an advanced qualification in Italian linguistics.

The Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) master's at Leiden University covers the entire range of present-day research on the civilisations of Greece and Rome, Egypt and the Ancient Near East.

The P.J. Cosijn Research Fellowship is an initiative to give promising Research MA students of Leiden University with an interest in Anglo-Saxon Studies the opportunity to conduct research on Old English language and literature. The Cosijn Fellowships are part of the ERC-funded project ‘Early Medieval…

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

Understanding the history of Islam and Muslim societies sheds a clear light on the complex and changing social structures of the Middle East, including the current trouble spots whose effect spreads all the way to Western Europe.

Impressions by Wouter Baas and Caroline Schep

Justin Bennett teaches in the Institute of Sonology of the Royal Conservatoire (KC) in the Hague. He is also a member of Jubilee, a platform for artistic research and production in Brussels.

The new Middle Eastern Library (MEL) will bring together the UBL's own Middle Eastern collections and the collections of the library of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), which has been part of the Leiden University Libraries since 1st January 2018.

Leiden University offers its students a wide range of bachelor's, master's and minors that explore sustainability or climate. Here, you find an overview of those programmes in the academic year 2020-2021.

Your time at Leiden is about more than just studying. Some of your best experiences will stem from being a part of our lively and diverse student community, as well as from life in the beautiful city of Leiden.

The specialisation in Translation at Leiden University offers a unique combination of translation theory, research and practice. This prepares you for either a further academic career as a researcher or a professional career in the language industry.

How can pre-Islamic poetry be used as a source to reconstruct the history of central Arabia at the dawn of Islam?

Building on its extensive holdings in Asian studies, including much material that can support the study of “unofficial” histories and cultures, Leiden University Libraries has established the Leiden Chinese Queer Collection (LCQC).

How did people across Central and Eastern Europe imagine the future during the transitions of the 1980s and 1990s? The umbrella term ‘post-communism’ does not provide an answer to this question. This project explores how writers and cultural theorists saw the potential future of their societies during…

Ancient historians have long been aware that patterns of coin circulation can shed light on levels of economic integration in the Roman Empire. More than forty years ago, Hopkins argued that large amounts of tax money were spent in the frontier provinces and that the non-military provinces recouped…

A new regional atlas, with information about the presence of pesticides in surface waters, has been developed by the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) in collaboration with Royal Haskoning DHV. The aim of the regional pesticide atlas is to support decision making at local and regional levels,…

Michiel van der Vaart with a team from Leiden University and the LUMC, led by IBL-researcher Annemarie Meijer, discovered that DRAM1 is a protein that regulates anti-bacterial autophagy, a defense mechanism against infections such as tuberculosis.

I’m Laurence Peelen and I am the new intern at the NVIC. I just finished my BA Islam Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen and I wanted to gain some more experience in the MENA region at the start of my Master’s program.

If computers work on superconducting current, they won’t consume any energy. Leiden physicists have now gained control over a new type of superconducting memory elements. Publication in Nature Communications.

The particle accelerator of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, produces large amounts of complex data with high accuracy, as a result of which theoretical predictions also need to be more accurate and faster. With his research team, PhD candidate Ben Ruijl developed very innovative…

The ICT.OPEN conference had no less than five Leiden highlights. PhD candidate Anna Louise Latour won the pitch prize of 500 euros and PhD candidate Can Wang won the second prize in the Commit2Data poster competition. In addition, Professor Holger Hoos gave the keynote lecture on the first day and Suzan…