On 11 and 12 April, the kick-off conference “The role of law in Libya’s national reconciliation” took place. The conference marked the official start of a research project by the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden University and the Centre for Law and Society Studies of the University of Benghazi on…

As the flagship journal of the National Academy of Sciences USA, PNAS publishes several special features each year highlighting topics that are expected to engage the interest of the journal’s broad readership. Archaeologist Wil Roebroeks was invited by the Editors of PNAS to contribute a paper on the…

The Netherlands sees thorny dilemmas placed with regard to the conviction of returning IS fighters. The Netherlands, like the other EU member states, does not respond to the Kurds' wish to take back 'their' Syrian people. Bart Schuurman, terrorism expert, states that an international tribunal, flanked…

Campaign initiated at Generosity to cover the cost of construction.

Leaders of the ASEAN Member States, Australia, China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand have signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement.

Over poep, pies en de beerput

With the new SSH labs and their organisation, the lab coordinators will also fulfill a new role. An interfaculty workgroup -consisting of staff from Psychology, Pedagogical Sciences, Humanities and SOLO - is currently discussing the new role of the lab coordinators, and how the lab coordinators can…

Kohei Suzuki, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration recently received a large research project grant from the Swedish Research Council.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) granted the research proposal submitted in the Free Competition by Prof. dr. F.C.W.J. Theuws (University of Leiden, Faculty of Archaeology) and Prof. dr. M. de Jong (University of Utrecht) entitled

Together with colleagues from the UK (lead), Burkina Faso, Ghana, Uganda, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, and Marjo de Theije of the VU (Amsterdam), Luning has obtained a research grant for the project 'Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: A Multi-Actor and Trans-Regional…

Nadine Chahine, designer of Arabic typefaces and external PhD candidate at Leiden University, has been named in Fast Company's 2012 ranking as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. ‘I see type as the means to engage in the larger context of culture and society,’ commented Chahine.

The article that was published on 21 January 2020 claims that chip maker ASML wants to be able to export to China but has been unable to obtain the necessary permits. Last summer, the application by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BZ) was suddenly frozen after pressure from the USA, according…

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.

After a successful pilot in 2016, the second edition of the International Arbitration Course took place at the end of August. The course is a tripartite collaboration between the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, the Department of Civil Law of Leiden Law School and the Permanent Court…

On 24 January an interdisciplinary workshop organised by Anna Smulders, PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, and Tarlach McGonagle, Professor of Media Law and Information Society, took place on the interaction between disinformation, emerging technologies and human rights.…

Law firm Ficq & Partners has pulled out of the Marengo trial in the Netherlands. It claims that the use of a crown witness entails ‘unmanageable risk’. Do the advantages of the crown witness scheme outweigh the risks? Jan Crijns takes stock in Dutch newspaper ‘Trouw’.

Leiden research on psychology and archaeology will boosted by two subsidies. Both research projects focus on children.

On Thursday 27 June, the last festive ILS Lunch Seminar of this academic year takes place. This seminar will feature presentations from two distinguished speakers from different departments of Leiden Law School: Prof. Pablo Mendes de Leon and Albert van Marwijk Kooy.

On 29 October a terrorist attack occurred in Nice. On the same day assaults also took place at the French consulate in Saudi Arabia and in the city of Lyon. How is it that France is so frequently targeted by extremists?

Jasper de Bie, who obtained his doctoral degree at the Institute of Criminal Law & Criminology and who is currently employed by the Ministry of Security and Justice, has been awarded an honourable third place in the international competition 'TRI Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation on Terrorism…

What do Byzantine fashion, mosaics, fortifications and menas ampullae have in common? Find out the answer at the second edition of a mini exhibition on Byzantine archaeology in the Van Steenis building.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded dr. Geeske Langejans a Veni grant for the research project What's in a plant? Tracking early human behaviour through plant processing and exploitation.

ARC is a new platform for the artistic-academic discourse in the Netherlands and is an initiative of the Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA).

Ook Polen wil het recht op een tijdelijk afschaffing op asiel, zo maakte premier Tusk onlangs bekend. Hoe groot zijn de kansen in Brussel en vormt dit een optie voor Nederland? Mark Klaassen, universitair docent Immigratierecht, spreekt over de kwestie in het Algemeen Dagblad.

Mirjam de Bruijn and camerman Sjoerd Sijsma have been travelling through Chad and Cameroon. The Arab spring hasn't arrived there yet, but the effects of internet and mobile telephony show in everyday life. Mirjam and Sjoerd look for counter voices: young people who try to change these countries in their…

On 7 and 8 October, a two-day workshop will be hosted by the Van Vollenhoven Institute in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Border Criminologies network and the Social Citizenship & Migration assisted area. The theme of the workshop will be ‘Border policing, boundary creation and emotion…

On March 11, a travelling photo exposition on the Mayan archaeological site El Mirador, in Guatemala, saw its festive opening at the Van Steenis building. For the occasion a special Faculty Lecture was organised, entitled 'Water Legacy: Mayan World Meets the Netherlands'. We were honored to receive…

The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic is a major biological and cultural threshold in the construction of our common humanity. Technological and behavioral changes happened simultaneously to a major climatic cooling, forcing human populations to develop new strategies for the exploitation…

Lecturer in Old and Middle English Thijs Porck was awarded the annual Leiden University Student Platform (LUS) Teaching Prize at the opening of the academic year. The jury praised his endless supply of innovative teaching ideas.

We regret to share the news that our colleague, friend, and former professor of Assyriology at Leiden University, passed away on 15 May 2021.

The popular French economist Gabriel Zucman visited the Netherlands last week, advocating an extra tax for billionaires. Egbert Jongen, Professor of Economics, spoke about the economist's proposals on NPO Radio 1's programme ‘De Rode Draad’.

The new Asian Library in the centre of Leiden accommodates the dispersed Asian collection of Leiden University. The festive opening of the Asian Library was marked by the Tour of Asia, an exciting knowledge festival, with workshops, talks and film screenings. Leiden anthropologists that work on Asia…

A recent study shows that immigrants in the Netherlands earn 15 per cent less on average than their colleagues without a migrant background. Olaf van Vliet, Professor of Economics, comments on this pay gap in ‘de Volkskrant’ newspaper.

Globalsmog Seminar Series #7 Morocco

On Wednesday 6 July 2022 Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) celebrated the graduation of the Class of 2022. The 170 students received their Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree’s in LUC’s interdisciplinary honours programme Liberal Arts & Sciences: Global Challenges.

A marathon session took place in Brussels from Sunday 30 June to Monday 1 July to decide who would become the new President of the European Commission. Arco Timmermans, Professor by special appointment Public Affairs at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University, appeared as a guest…

Amsterdam’s attitude to sex work, politeness in historical Arabic letters and malaria in the Middle Ages: again this year, there was a wide variety of topics in the Research Traineeship programme. On Friday 30 August, the trainees finished the last of these projects for now.

Leiden University and the University of Amsterdam, together with Heritage Leiden and Region, are developing a map application of historical Leiden.

The Australian Research Council funded a truly ‘global archaeology’ project comparing the archaeologies of southwest Tasmania and southwest France during the last Ice Age.

It’s only been six years since bestselling author Jeroen Windmeijer (56) decided to become a full-time writer. Since then, he’s put Leiden and the university on the map with his gripping thrillers. From his desk on the Rapenburg canal, he now travels the world with his steadily growing body of work.

Lecture, China Seminar

As University historian, Pieter Slaman researches the University’s past, but he’s equally interested in its present. ‘It’s useful to be familiar with issues from the past. Not to be rooted in the past because some developments from history are things you definitely don’t want to repeat.’

In the National Think Tank (NDT) 20 young academics spend four months reflecting on how to solve a societal problem. Four participants from Leiden told us about their experience.

Dutch people are far more law-abiding than they might like to think. And they are very different from the Belgians in that regard. The different approaches of the two governments towards the coronavirus crisis, for example, can be explained from the history of both countries since the Middle Ages. Historians…

The map application includes information from old and new buildings archaeological projects. This makes it possible to investigate whether water facilities (wells, cisterns) and waste facilities (cesspits, sewers) were the privilege of Leiden’s wealthy elite in the late 16th and 17th centuries or whether…

The aim of ANCIENT CHARM was to develop neutron-imaging techniques and the associated equipment, and help establish neutron imaging as a mainstream archaeological analytical technique. In particular, one of the goals was a new imaging technique which called neutron resonant capture imaging combined…