During the coronavirus pandemic, scientists were in a hurry to find drugs that would help fight the disease. To combine the research that was being carried out around the world, PhD candidate Judith ter Schure developed a new statistical method: ALL-IN meta-analysis. This helps determine sooner whether…

Although the official start of the academic year has to wait for another fortnight, Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) welcomed the Class of 2024 to the Anna van Bueren campus this week. The new cohort of 204 incoming students will spend the next three years studying different majors and minors…

This practical guide is aimed at PhD candidates, Research Master Students, and early-career researchers from all academic disciplines. The instructions in the guide intend to inspire young researchers and to help them practice Open Science, by sharing all aspects of research as open possible.

From 6-8 April 2026 the conference "From the ground up: The politics of burial and memory in the early Islamic world" will take place in Cairo, Egypt. Deadline for sending in your abstract: 21 June 2025.

It was more than twenty years ago that the plan for a Japanese-Dutch dictionary was born. Now it contains over 65,000 words, and completion is tentatively coming into view. Dictionary makers Oscar Veltink and Hetty Geerdink-Verkoren talk about their enthusiasm for this decades-long mammoth task.

Lecture, VVIK lecture

Research

When hobby divers revisited a nearly 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Texel, they discovered more than 1,000 objects in wooden boxes. Eight years later, postdoc Janet Dickinson used recovered books to compile a profile of the mysterious owner.

PhD candidate Alex Tutwiler, from the Faculty of Archaeology, has received a grant from Archol, via the P.J.R. Modderman Foundation, to investigate how child labor shaped the bones of Dutch children between the 17th and 19th centuries. Using CT scans, she aims to build a more comprehensive picture of…

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Are magnetic fields older than the first light? And how did they influence the development of our universe right after the Big Bang? Cosmologists from Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht are now collaborating to investigate this.

The Leiden Faculty of Archaeology is an institution of international renown. Frequently, researchers from other places of learning visit the faculty to broaden and deepen their own expertise. Currently, the Laboratory for Human Osteoarchaeology is hosting two scholars from Egypt, Samar Abudahab and…

Leiden University's Kiem grants aim to help develop new interdisciplinary and interfaculty collaborations and encounters. In the first round, a Kiem grant was awarded to a group of researchers from the Faculty of Archaeology, the Faculty of Social Sciences, and the LUMC for the organisation of a symposium…

Debates about the ‘end’ of the Roman era, how, when, and even if it ended, are still very much alive and raging. However, what happened after the (long) late antique period is a lesser-known and lesser-studied subject. The post-Roman past needs, however, as much energetic investigation and discussion.…

Leiden University has designed a new Urban Development Plan for the Humanities Campus. This plan incorporates participation from the immediate environment (neighbours and nearby residents). The plan will be available for viewing at the Leiden city council offices from 22 December for six weeks.

On Thursday, May 16, Leiden University Libraries is organizing a workshop on early photography of the Middle East. In the workshop, curator Maartje van den Heuvel shows photos of three adventurous Dutch nineteenth-century travel and photography pioneers. They created beautiful photos and photo albums…

Yes, the new Humanities Campus is going to be smaller in size. But no, that doesn’t mean there’ll be any shortage of space. The available area and a creative design will give us all the room we need. So what will such a design look like? Take a look for yourself in the Arsenaal, the Pieter de la Court…

Leiden University has taken note of the results of the public support survey conducted by housing corporation De Sleutels among the residents of the 58 rental appartments in the Doelen complex. The findings show that the majority of the residents of the Doelencomplex are not willing to move to alternative…

On Tuesday 19 March, Chris Suijker (Director of Real Estate) handed over the key of the Herta Mohr Building to Saskia Goedhard (Executive Director of the Faculty of Humanities), officially transferring the management of this building to the Faculty of Humanities.

The Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award is presented every two years on 10 December (Human Rights Day) in recognition of outstanding academic works in the field of international human rights.

This summer, the COBRA Museum will be focusing on Moroccan art. 'The other story' exhibition presents for the first time Moroccan modernism in the Netherlands. The Netherlands Institute Morocco (NIMAR) contributed to its exhibition

If you missed the annual LUCDH Winter School Week of Digital Humanities workshops and Pilot Project Symposium (27 – 31 January 2025) this time around, you’ll have a chance to take part next year. Save the dates for the last week of January 2026!

There are some changes in the plans for the development of the Humanities Campus. The Faculty of Humanities along with the central organisation and the Real Estate department need to save costs due to the financial challenges at the faculty and the cuts in higher education. At the same time, we still…

Despite Covid, the development of the Humanities Campus continues steadily. After finishing the renovated P.J. Veth building and Arsenaal, the demolition of Cluster Zuid has been completed and the contractor will soon start with the renovations.

Around lunchtime on 28 October, 18 of our colleagues gathered in a room at the Lipsius, while 22 other colleagues settled in front of their computer for a one-hour update on the development of the alternative Humanities Campus. Dean of the Faculty of Humanities Mark Rutgers and Vice-Chairman of the…

The start of the renovation of Cluster Zuid was a long time coming, but the moment has finally arrived. On Wednesday 8 June, Dean Mark Rutgers, accompanied by the contractor Constructif, symbolically marked the start of the demolition and reconstruction works by demolishing part of the roof.

A better integration of Digital Humanities into study programmes, so that students develop their digital skills as well as possible. That is what Hossam Ahmed wants to achieve in the coming years. He received a senior Comenius Fellowship to develop a digital programme for students.

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

During the Late Pleistocene, Europe was a cold and unforgiving place to live. Even so, groups of early modern humans roamed around, just like their Neanderthal counterparts. It is unclear what kind of dwellings these people inhabited to shelter them against the elements, especially in regions without…

This initiative is supported by the Leiden University Global Seed Fund (LUGF) 2025, awarded to Santy Kouwagam (VVI) and Irene Hadiprayitno (LIAS) together with Universitas Indonesia.

For every period, it is a challenge to unearth the details of political trafficking; yet the effort needs to include all relevant persons, groups, and institutions – not only those wielding formal responsibilities. We hope to reinvigorate this effort by inviting specialists to present their research…

Dr Amanda Henry has secured a prestigious Vici grant for her groundbreaking research project, Hominin FoodWays: Changing Diet and Food Processing Across Climate Frontiers. This five-year study, set to begin in September, aims to unravel the dietary adaptations of Eurasian hominins between 1.8 and 0.9…

How do you find your was as an early career researcher in the academic pressure cooker?

Over the past few months, Urban Studies students have been helping to think about the realisation of the Humanities Campus. To test their knowledge in practice, the future urban specialists gave advice on several different aspects, including thermal energy storage and the new central campus building…