Lex Bohlmeijer, creator of the Good Conversations podcast at De Correspondent, is recording a podcast in Theater aan het Spui in The Hague. In his Good Coversations podcast, Lex talks politics, arts, journalism and science, with a wide range of guests who have an exceptional and often unknown story.…

Every year Leiden University celebrates the lifting of the siege of 1574, with the 3 October University. This year the event will be held on the 4th of October between 11 am and 1 pm. Visit the tent in the city centre of Leiden, to hear three of our scientists talk about their research on the theme…

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

Research into 25 years of lethal violence in the Netherlands and into language socialisation of deaf families in Africa will receive grants from the Leiden University Fund (LUF).

Comparison between babies and song-birds when they are learning a non-existent language—a study of this kind has never been tried before. But this is what Claartje Levelt, Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) and Jelle Zuidema (University of Amsterdam) are attempting.

Brain scanners have radically changed neurolinguistics. They are increasing our understanding of how the brain processes language. Professor Niels Schiller has produced a standard work on this.

It will be a summer filled with conferences at the Faculty of Humanities in Leiden. In the coming months, there will be something for everyone at the university, especially in the field of languages and cultures of Africa and the Middle East.

Izra ter Weer's mother had studied English Language and Culture in Leiden and was always so enthusiastic about her studies that Izra decided to follow in her footsteps. After completing a Master's degree in Linguistics, she now works as a consultant at strategic consultancy firm Sprenkels and organises…

No fewer than three Leiden University Humanities scholars have been awarded funding from the NWO’s Free Competition in the Humanities programme: two grants of 750,000 euros and one of 705,000 euros. In total, twelve researchers have received a grant in the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities domain.

'Psychologists think I’m a linguist but linguists think I’m a psychologist,' says cognitive neuroscientist Xiaochen Zheng. With the Veni grant she will be able to bring these two fields of research closer together. Read her answers to five questions.

What are the rights of migrants in Morocco and how do this receiving state and migrants deal with them in practice?

LUCL is pleased to announce that Bobby Ruijgrok has been awarded a PhD-position within the NWO PhDs in the Humanities Programme. His project is entitled 'Tapping into semantic recovery: an event-related potential study on the processing of gapping'. LUCL congratulates Bobby on this beautiful result.

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) is concentrating increasingly on research into the role of the brain in language development. The institute has now set up the LIBC Language website that brings together all the information on this research.

Was Nabatean also a spoken language? And if so, for how long? These are just two questions that historical linguist Benjamin Suchard will address in his new research project. Suchard is one of three LUCL researchers to receive a coveted Veni grant of 250.000 euros from the Dutch Research Council (NW…

For many deaf Ghanaians, Ghanaian Sign Language is their first language. But for more deaf signers to be able to fully participate in society, more sign language interpreters, deaf school teachers and family members need to be trained. What better way to facilitate this by means of a Ghanaian Sign Language…

Leiden University's interdisciplinary research programme SAILS funds young interdisciplinary scientists working at the intersection of AI and other fields. Researcher Matthijs Westera talks about his experiences working within SAILS and the Leiden academic community.

The Republic of Indonesia celebrated its 75th Independence Day on 17 August 2020. As a gift to celebrate this, on the initiative of a group of Leiden alumni*), a biography will be written of Leiden and Indonesian scholar Hoesein Djajadiningrat.

Seminar 12th of April

Leiden University professor of Science-Based Business Simcha Jong Kon Chin has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Migrants are expensive. Or are they? Professor Olaf van Vliet collaborated on a big research project from Leiden University to map the costs of migration. During the last episode of this season of the podcast Open Geesten (Open Minds), he talks about the initial results. Do migrants really put a lot…

Distracted eating is common and has adverse health consequences. Read more about the research of Leiden social psychologist Lotte van Dillen and some strategies to combat that behavior.

Seven researchers from Leiden University have made a successful application to the Open Competition SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) XS, a Dutch Research Council pilot programme.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics has been badly affected by the corona crisis: the research in the four labs and the fieldwork has come to a standstill. What are the implications?

Uncovering ageing processes in the brain and research on the use of the word ‘that’. Thanks to a Rubicon Grant, two Leiden researchers who were recently awarded their PhDs will be able to conduct research at a research institute abroad.

ICEHL is a conference on all aspects and subjects relating to English Historical Linguistics. Having started in Durham, in 1979, its twenty-first edition will be held at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics 8-12 June, 2020.

The Leiden Center for the Study of Ancient Arabia (LeiCenSAA) announces a new open access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the epigraphy of Arabia and its cultural and linguistic context: Arabian Epigraphic Notes

Humanities Faculty Leiden occupies a 49th place in the field of Arts & Humanities in the QS World University Ranking. Especially the subject areas Linguistics and History & Archeology rank high, with respectively a 26th and 28th place. Leiden University has fallen by one place in the annual QS World…

ICEHL is a conference on all aspects and subjects relating to English Historical Linguistics. Having started in Durham, in 1979, its twenty-first edition will be held at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, 7-11 June, 2021.

Thijs Porck, teacher at English Language and Culture, has won the faculty teaching prize. He was lauded for his enthousiasm, his creative ways of teaching, and his commitment to his students.

Since March 5th, the road between Holland Spoor Station and the old city centre of The Hague (also called the “Loper Oude Centrum”) features 33 sayings in various languages that are spoken in The Hague – many of which are taught here at LUCL.

On the 9th of November 2022, 149 groups of last year's primary school children from 31 schools around the Netherlands had the opportunity to become social scientists for a day, researching their own social environment in a Citizen Science project called ‘Wij vinden!” (We find!)

With this grant the researchers seek to shed light on the factors which play a role in transmitting jihadist ideas, and explore possible ways to mitigate this transmission.

The outreach and engagement platform BrainTrain consists of five enthusiastic students of the masters programme Forensic Family Science. As part of their project, the students visit high-schools to teach adolescents about the brain, make them experience that their own reality is not always the only…

Underneath you will find the 12 most important Facebook events that took place at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs in the past year, and an overview of our Instagram highlights of 2018.

Commissioned by ‘Politie en Wetenschap’, Pauline Aarten, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, and Marieke Liem, Associate Professor at Leiden University, published their new research last week. The study

Eveline Crone surmises that adolescence also has a positive effect on social development. She believes, for example, that it is in adolescence that young people learn the skills of cooperation, sharing and helpfulness. She will be researching this hypothesis in the coming period with an ERC Consolidator…

‘What a relief,’ was psychologist Mariska Kret’s reaction to the news of her Vidi grant from the national science financier NWO. The grant makes it possible for her to carry out new research into emotions and trust in patients with a social anxiety disorder and patients with autism.

How do digital technologies affect adolescent mental health and resilience? How do we foster a secure online environment? How should we deal with increasing rates of online crimes among adolescents? During the mini-symposium ‘The effect of the online world on adolescents’, presented by the interdisciplinary…

How do parents communicate anxiety to their child via body language and words? Psychologist Cosima Nimphy studied this question for her PhD research. Experiments show that children of anxious parents are not more sensitive to their parents’ signs of anxiety.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded a KNAW Early Career Partnership 2023 to Philippe van Gruisen for interdisciplinary research on (labour) migration from a broad perspective on societal wellbeing.

Developmental psychologist Barbara Braams has moved to Harvard University to study social influences on adolescents’ decision making in risky and ambiguous situations. NWO awarded her a Rubicon grant for talented scientists who have recently obtained a PhD.

Every year many Leiden lecturers and students visit an international university for the purposes of research or study. In the coming newsletters a different Leiden scholar will give his or her view from abroad.

Five Leiden researchers have been nominated as members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).They will be inaugurated on 16 September.

When it comes to literature, people mostly talk about what characters see or hear. Rarely is it about what they smell. That’s a shame, thinks university lecturer Jan van Dijkhuizen. He has been awarded an Open Competition grant from NWO to expand academic knowledge about scent in literature, and to…

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

LUCL is pleased to announce that Professor Johan Rooryck has been awarded both an NWO Horizon Grant for his project entitled 'Knowledge and culture', and an NWO Vrije Competitie Grant for his project entitled 'Lend me your ears: the grammar of (un)transferable possession' for a total of €2.75m.

Seven Leiden researchers have each been awarded a Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). This will enable them to form a research group and develop their own innovative line of research.

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars