Devin DeWeese, Indiana University Bloomington, will be the Central Asia Visiting Professor between 5-17 September 2016. Professor DeWeese will deliver a guest lecture on Monday, 12 September (Lipsius 148, 3pm) and a masterclass on Friday, 16 September within the Central Asia initiative at Leiden Uni…

In prehistoric times there was a huge wave of migration, from the steppes in Russia and Ukraine to West Europe. The newcomers’ genes began to dominate. Archaeology research in Leiden into burial mounds in the Veluwe and Utrechtse Heuvelrug areas of the Netherlands yielded this spectacular conclusion.…

Reviewed by Simon Polinder.

Lecture | Leiden Lectures on Arabic Language & Culture

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

Donald Trump was sworn into his second period as President of the United States on 20 January 2025. Since then, the Trump administration has raised alarms for people around the world who are concerned over what this will mean for the current geopolitical landscape. Join a panel of experts to discuss…

On the occasion of Euroscience Open Forum 2022, Professor Attiya Waris (Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Fiscal Law and Policy in Eastern Africa, University of Nairobi, Kenya), Professor Irma Mosquera Valderrama (Professor of Global Tax Governance, Lead Researcher GLOBTAXGOV ERC…

Corinne Hofman, Leiden Professor of the Archaeology of the Caribbean Region has been awarded the 2013 KNAW Merian Prize for women in science. Her aim with her research is to broaden the history of the colonisation of the Americas to include the perspective of the indigenous Indian population.

A delegation from various Serbian universities and government institutions will visit the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs from Monday 27 to Wednesday 29 May. They will discuss the development of an educational programme in public policymaking and analysis in Serbia. An interview with Serbian…

A flake of limestone (ostracon) inscribed with an ancient Egyptian word list of the fifteenth century BC turns out to be the world’s oldest known abecedary. The words have been arranged according to their initial sounds, and the order followed here is one that is still known today. This discovery has…

Some 5000 years ago the people of the corded ware culture exchanged ideas about death on a continental scale. There were strong gender differences in these ideas: men were buried in an international style, and women in a local style. This discovery was made by archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois.

The second authors' conference of the General Labour History of Africa (GLHA) project will be held from 10 to 12 December 2015 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

A marvelous mosaic synagogue floor has been discovered at the Israeli excavation site of Horvat Kur. The timeworn stones of the mosaic clearly form the name ‘El’azar’. Leiden University researcher Jürgen Zangenberg and a group of Leiden students played a role in the excavation. ‘El’azar was likely an…

Three international research projects involving Leiden University researchers will receive funding from the Una Europa university alliance.

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…

For the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), the investigation into the MH17 plane crash was unprecedented in scope. It wasn’t easy, but it provided valuable lessons for international disaster investigations, says Sanneke Kuipers, a crisis expert from the Institute of Security and Global Affairs.

A far-reaching understanding of human behaviour is necessary to get to grips with conflicts in society and to encourage parties to meet each other halfway. Psychologists, anthropologists and political scientists from Leiden are making invaluable contributions to that understanding. You can find out…

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other languages.'

The impact of war extends beyond destroyed buildings and torn families. In bilingual Ukraine, the ongoing war with Russia is a major driver for increasingly discarding the Russian language. What does this mean for the position of Russian in Ukraine?

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

Drones are proving to be a good means of mapping man-made changes in the landscape. Geophysicist Till Sonneman and his colleagues (archaeology) are experimenting with drones in inaccessible areas of the Caribbean.

Leiden University has six top bachelor's programmes according to Keuzigids universiteiten 2025, a consumer guide to university programmes. This puts Leiden in fourth place of the broad-based universities.

Archaeologist Corinne Hofman wins the Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship 2018/19 for research into the changing world of indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism. “The perspective of indigenous communities is still lacking in most history books.

Dr. Miguel John Versluys was awarded the Zenobia Essay Prize during the recent conference Troy: the city, the war, the legend organized by the Zenobia Foundation in the Lutheran church in Amsterdam.

In July 2023, Leiden University conducted another phase of its ongoing archaeological collaboration with the Kalinago Territory in the Caribbean island of Dominica. Activities focused on mapping and assessing coastal sites impacted by climate stressors, undertaking knowledge-exchange sessions, and co-creating…

Historical figures such as Columbus have returned to the centre of public debate. Much remains to be discovered about his legacy and current impact on our society. A new study shows the ecological footprint that the arrival of Europeans left in the Caribbean islands.

An enormous number of monumental buildings, such as burial tombs, appeared in Mycenaean Greece after 1600 BC. Why did this urge to build come to an abrupt end 400 years later? Archaeologist Ann Brysbaert investigates the possible causes thanks to her ERC Consolidator Grant.

‘In recent publications about the slave trade the same rhetorical weapons are used as two centuries ago in the battle for the abolition of the British slave trade. It is a topic fraught with emotions, but that should not prevent historians from being as careful and impartial as possible in their research,’…

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…

Four scientists from Leiden University have each been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). This grant, worth up to two million euros, gives researchers the opportunity to head up a research team for five years.

How did people move and form communities when human societies first shifted from hunting and gathering to farming? A new study of the Neolithic period in southwest Asia, the birthplace of agriculture, offers fresh insights.

Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, member of the Faculty of Archaeology, was successful in receiving a grant from the Bijvanck Foundation for a first campaign of work at Tell Begum, northern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan). A small international team directed by Olivier Nieuwenhuyse in a joint effort with the Directorate…

For 2022, The Iranian-German project 'The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration of Premodern Societies' announces the second round of fellowship grants. The fellowship is open for both iranian and non-iranian researchers, especially in archaeology but also in other interdisciplinary fields focussing…

Who authored the best theses in Leiden University's Political Science BSc programmes?

To give a better idea of the research at Leiden University, a new website has been launched that lists the University’s institutes together with the disciplines that they cover. But the institutes also work together intensively.

The Council of the Academia Europaea (AE) has announced prof.dr. Corinne Hofman as one of the new Academy members. Corinne Hofman, Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology is one of a number of eminent international scholars from across the continent of Europe who were invited to accept membership in 2016,…

A consortium, led by Erik de Maaker (CADS, Leiden), has under the NWA scheme (Dutch National Science agenda) been awarded 98k€ for Localizing Global Garment Biographies, a two-year project to research the different ways by which users and producers attach value to garments.

Joanita Vroom and Mink van IJzendoorn have been awarded a grant of the Chastelain‐Nobach Fund, enabling them to continue their work at Gortyn, Crete. This project offers students opportunities to help uncover the archaeological mysteries of this important Roman and Byzantine city.

With the start of June, the annual Leiden Archaeology Field School has begun. Like last year, the Field School takes place in Oss. Every week, a group of 25 first year students gets to learn the ins and outs of a professional excavation.

Today’s world faces large-scale climate change and other environmental disruptions. Meeting these challenges involves major adjustments to economy and society, with substantial potential for conflict and violence. This dialogue assembled leading authorities on the relationship between climate and peace,…

On Saturday October 16, the special exhibition ‘Shared Sky: Canvases of the Universe’ opens in the Old Observatory in Leiden. The exhibit takes a cultural look at the starry sky by Aboriginal Australian and South African artists, and features colorful artwork that explores how these Indigenous cultures…

The exhibition Unity and Diversity in the Amerindian Caribbean: The El Cabo San Rafael Archaeological Site has been officially opened by Prof. dr. Corinne Hofman on Tuesday evening in Santo Domingo.

A new government, conflicts around the world and obviously a lot of science: these are the five stories about Leiden University that you enjoyed reading in 2024.

From the 11th of May Ewa Snaar-Jagalska has been appointed Professor in the field of cellular tumor biology within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology Leiden. Her research focuses on the cellular tumor biology and human cancer modeling in zebrafish

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…

Studying Sumerian grammar in your free time: Bram Jagersma did it. He described centuries-old Sumerian using a modern method he devised himself. For this PhD research he was awarded the De La Court Award for Independent Research by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science (KNAW).

On November 16 a festschrift in honor of Dr Olivier Nieuwenhuyse was presented in a moving event at the Faculty of Archaeology. Professor Bleda Düring, a personal friend of Nieuwenhuyse, was one of the initiators. ‘If he had been here, he would have loved this book.’

Another year has reached its end. And what a year it has been! On December 17th staff and students of the Faculty of Archaeology came together to celebrate and reminisce. The event's central topic was the closure of the 50 year anniversary of the collaboration between the Faculty of Archaeology and…

What is the relationship between democracy and peace? Do the two go hand in hand, so that less democracy means less peace? Or can democracy work against peace: for example, by producing protectionist and militarist governments? Or is there something more deeply wrong with democracy as we know it, such…

The Greek alphabet dates back to the eighth century BC. At least, that is what science assumed for a long time. Associate Professor Willemijn Waal is going to use a Vici grant to investigate whether the Greek alphabet may be centuries older, and was initially written only on perishable materials.