The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

Leiden University and Delft University of Technology are committed to providing you with a quality graduate education by scientists who bring their cutting-edge research into the classroom. For the Industrial Ecology MSc programme, both universities integrate the expertise of two internationally recognised…

Do you deeply care about our planet and are you eager to make a real change? Then our two-year MSc programme Industrial Ecology may be the place for you. The interdisciplinary programme, offered jointly by Leiden University and TU Delft, is a true powerhouse for sustainability solutions. As a student…

During Leiden City of Science 2022, Janet Grijzenhout and Hannah De Mulder will put multilingualism in the spotlight by organising multilingual storytelling afternoons. They hope to show parents that raising children multilingually is achievable as well as beneficial.

The cultural linguistic minority group of deaf people who communicate using sign language systematically experiences limited access to fundamental rights. Linguist Joni Oyserman identified this problem and has received a Meijers grant to fund her investigation.

Ten Leiden researchers will receive funding of up to 280,000 euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). They will use this grant to develop their research ideas in the coming three years.

Every year, an outstanding lecturer receives the Faculty Teaching Prize from the teaching committee. The prize is awarded during the official opening of the academic year on 7 September. This year, students nominated eight candidates.

Faced with warfare on the European continent and growing Sino-American geopolitical disputes, the EU’s rising use of sanctions and attention to economic security call for a better diplomatic understanding of how state-market actor-networks are assets of modern foreign and security policy.

On Tuesday, April 16, 2024, students, instructors, staff and other guests gathered at the Faculty Club for an exciting event: a discussion entitled “The First 20 Years: Reconsidering European Union Enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe.” His Excellency Mr. René Miko, Ambassador of the Czech Republic…

Investigating the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial Dutch Brazil.

Street theatre, drama, poetry and a lot of science: Leiden's Rapenburg was the backdrop for the fifth Night of Art and Knowledge on Saturday 16 September. Many University buildings - from the Observatory to the Hortus - opened their doors to artists, scientists and a public curious to know more.

How do you make lobbying and rhetoric both challenging and understandable for high school students? Professor Jaap de Jong found the answer in climate activist Greta Thunberg. Together with his colleague Arco Timmermans, he developed a digital guest lecture on how to present a convincing story.

On Friday 16 February 2024, Rudolf E. de Jong passed away unexpectedly in Cairo. Since 2012, he was the director of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC), which he skillfully managed for 12 years. He was laid to rest in Amsterdam on 27 February. Rudolf was 65.

Sumerian is a dead language that is not related to any other language. Howeverr, Bram Jagersma managed to compile a grammar of the language, based on inscriptions and clay tablets. Traces of the Sumerian number system can still be seen in our sixty-minute hour. Jagersma received his PhD on 4 Novembe…

Whispp, a Leiden-based speech technology start-up, is developing an app to help people who stutter express themselves more freely. Among those working together with Joris Castermans and his team at Whispp, are researchers and students from the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL).

It is with profound sadness that we have learned of the passing of our colleague and friend, Dr Harold M Hays. Harold passed away on Wednesday 20 November, in his sleep, as a result of heart failure.

For a lot of students, the covid crisis means that a sense of community is hard to find during their studies. Lettie Dorst, university lecturer of translation studies and English linguistics, explains how she tries to create a 'community of learners’.

Tingting Hui started her PhD project at LUCAS in September 2015. Her promotors will be Ernst van Alphen and Yasco Horsman from the Literary Studies department.

During the past year online meetings and lectures have become a firm feature of university life. One of the highlights of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics’ online activities has been the online seminar series ‘Language policy and practices in the Global North and South’ organised by guest…

It does not happen very often that a research project for a second-year bachelor's course gets turned into a proper academic paper. But International Studies students Pia Kurz, Coleen Gonner and Monika Bartnicka did just that. How did they manage it?

After a successful career as a singer, Esmee Schoones started studying French a few years ago. It resulted in a national award for her thesis on musical arrangements of Verlaine's poems and a job teaching French.

On Friday 16 February 2024, Rudolf E. de Jong passed away unexpectedly in Cairo. Since 2012, he was the director of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC), which he skillfully managed for 12 years. He was laid to rest in Amsterdam on 27 February. Rudolf was 65.

Do you gain enough practical experience in an academic language and culture study programme? Certainly, proved the bachelor students of Italian this summer. For the Transfer IT programme, they combined their own interests with the knowledge they gained during their studies. This resulted in vastly different…

Berber languages have long been banned from public life in North Africa, but the situation has changed drastically. Linguistic research is generating new insights on the distant past and on present-day Dutch Moroccans. This is the finding of Maarten Kossmann, the only professor of Berber Studies in…

Do you want to make contact with potential talent at an early stage of their career? Leiden University Career Services can help you can get in touch with students and young alumni.

How do you set up a successful collaboration between science and practice? That was the main theme of the final meeting of a triptych of symposia on how Leiden University can improve inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2022. In recent years, the alliance has expanded to include centres and new programmes as well as a curriculum of its own. What do the next ten years have in store?

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.

The Public Day of the Leiden Institute of Brain and Cognition (LIBC) has grown in recent years into one of the most popular popular-science events in Leiden. Tickets are selling fast for the upcoming edition on Friday 11 October in Stadsgehoorzaal in Leiden. Professor Bernet Elzinga tells us more.

Uncovering ancient Arabian inscriptions feels like pioneering detective work, says Arabist Michael Macdonald in a video interview with Leiden Islam Centre LUCIS. 'First you have to learn the alphabets that they're written in, and then you have to try and work out what they say.'

For her research into complex family problems, an assistant professor in Forensic Family and Youth Care Studies Sabine van der Asdonk has won the Gratama Science Prize 2021, a prize for talented young researchers from the universities of Leiden and Groningen. The jury praised Van der Asdonk’s excellent…

From video glasses for the deaf to protecting endangered languages. The Taalmuseum's new exhibition in the hall of the University's former library demonstrates how language research contributes to societal issues such as health care and disappearing cultures. The exhibition is open from 14 September…

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni funding to four Humanities researchers in at Leiden University. This award offers promising young scientists the opportunity to develop their own ideas over a period of three years.

Register now for the World Press Freedom Conference 2020 digital edition (9 – 10 December 2020)!

Julia van Alem had never held a camera before, but she and her classmates were appointed as the City Photographer. ‘This project helped me learn how to create my own work better.’

The AI chatbot ChatGPT has a clear left-liberal bias when filling in the Stemwijzer voting advice application. This was discovered by master's student Merel van den Broek during an assignment for the Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing course.

Give Nikki IJzerman a football and she’s happy. The midfielder was named Player of the Year by ADO Den Haag last season, as well as obtaining her master’s degree in Journalism and New Media.

Translating poetry is notoriously difficult. Translating poetry in such a way that the humorous nature of a poem remains intact is even more difficult, even though it is precisely jokes that can encourage children to read more, notes PhD candidate Alice Morta.

Neighbourhood newspapers, newsletters and Facebook groups: Leiden residents have dozens of ways to keep each other informed about news in their neighbourhood. Students from the pre-master's programme in Journalism and New Media mapped out all these different media and asked themselves: what is the future…

When university lecturer Martine Bruil was on exchange in Ecuador as a teenager, she fell in love with the area's ancient languages. Now, more than 20 years later, she is starting a research project on the kinship of the language Awapit with the Quechua language that was spread by the Incas.

On 2 November, more than 800 students visited Leiden's Humanities Faculty to explore their options during the Master's Open Day. Read some of their stories here!

The Faculty of Humanities offers an inspiring international working environment with room for diversity and innovation to staff and students from home and abroad.

PhD defence

New PhD opportunities in Medieval and Neo-Latin Studies, a collaboration between the Institute of Greek and Latin Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. Deadline for application: 31 March 2025.

The Language Learning Resource Centre (Leiden University) is organizing a one-day conference (June 5th, 2020) on the interplay between second language learning practice, theory, and research.

The Leiden University Excellence Scholarships Programme (LExS) provides scholarships for excellent international students from outside the EU/EEA who come to Leiden to follow a master’s programme. The first eighty LExS scholarships have been awarded for this academic year.