What you see is what you get, is how people who know him describe Mark Rutgers who became Dean of our Faculty on 1 March. For some of us he is a familiar face, and for those who don’t yet know him, he hopes to get to meet them soon. His first three months will be taken up with a lot of reading and even…

Lecture

PhD defence

PhD defence

Middle East Studies Lecture

PhD defence

PhD defence

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.

Video conferencing from your sitting room and algorithms on social media that know your interests: new technology is an increasingly integral part of our lives. At the same time there is a growing call to protect our privacy, and this is causing friction, at the University too. In part because of the…

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 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?

In the Humans of Humanities series, we will do a portrait of one of our researchers, staff members or students, every other week.

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.

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.

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…

For ten months, PhD student Sanne Rotmeijer worked on the editorial boards of various news media on Curaçao and Sint Maarten. She also tracked how news goes around on the streets and circulates on social media. The aim? To find out how stories became 'the news'.

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!

Dr. Ahmad Al-Jallad and Prof.dr. Peter Akkermans have been awarded with the NWO Free Competition Grant for their research project 'Landscapes of Survival: Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan's Black Desert, c. 1000 BC to 500 AD'. Together, they study settlements, burials and inscr…

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…

‘Timmermans says more Polish workers are staying in Poland, but there aren’t any figures to back this up,’ was the headline of NU.nl news website during the European elections in 2019. This was after Nieuwscheckers, the fact-checkers at Leiden University, had checked a statement by PvdA politician Frans…

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.

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

The Faculty of Humanities’ On-Campus Master’s Experience Day was a pleasantly busy event. The information sessions and corresponding information market went down well with interested undergraduates.

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.’

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.

Staff from Leiden University are starting the Dutch universities’ staggered strike against the government cuts on 10 March. Follow the strike in this liveblog.

Always taking the same route to work, going for that one dish in restaurants and going on the same holiday each summer: this may ring a bell for those who don’t like uncertainty. Researchers are now discovering that this aversion affects how we understand the world.

Two thousand years ago, the Middle East found itself caught between the rise of the Roman Empire in the west and the Parthian Empire in the east. PhD candidate Nolke Tasma has been awarded an NWO grant to investigate how local inhabitants experienced these changes.

Contacts between English and Dutch speakers had a profound impact on the literary landscape and book culture of England and the Low Countries. This conference crosses conventional chronological, linguistic, geographical and disciplinary boundaries to explore the cultural history of relations between…

Nineteen new Leiden University MOOCs have started this January. Anyone can take part in these online courses varying from combatting terrorism to kidney transplantation.

In the media, we hear a lot of worrying news from Africa: refugees, attacks, Ebola, starvation, corruption... But Africa is much more than that: it is a continent in transition, with developments occurring at breakneck speed. African Studies scholars from different academic disciplines in Leiden conduct…

Leidens's Classics and History rank 6th and 15th place in the QS World University Rankings by Subject. Every year, QS ranks universities all over the world on academic reputation and research impact, grouped by subject. Linguistics (23), Languages (39) and Religious Studies (40) also do well in the…

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 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.

The Fryske Akademy, the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning, the Professorship Multilingualism and Literacy of NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, the department of Frisian Studies of the University of Groningen, and the department Language, Technology…

Leiden’s Religious Studies ranks 40th place in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

On 3 June, Annetje Ottow (chair) and Hester Bijl (rector magnificus) met the Humanities faculty. Although a physical introduction was preferred, this visit also had to be done digitally.

The faculty of Humanities scores well in the anual QS World Universities Ranking By Subject list. This year we have placed sixth in the category Classics and Ancient History.

After more than seven years as Managing Editor of Common Market Law Review, preceded by 22 years as Associate Editor and three years as Secretary to the Editors, Alison McDonnell will be retiring in December 2022.

Meike de Goede has received a research grant of €14,600 from the Gerda Henkel Foundation for her research on the post-colonial silencing of anti-colonial resistance in Congo-Brazzaville.

PhD defence

Festival

Krista Murchison, University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, received a Veni grant of 250.000 euros. Her Veni-project will explore the ‘immaterial archive’ and its social and historical significance by digitally recreating manuscripts that were destroyed during World…

Clothes designer, manager at a multinational or dermatologist: the twenty refugee students who are taking part in the Preparatory Study Year in Leiden (VJL) are burning with ambition. The study year started on Thursday 26 January in festive style.

The speed at which science is changing our lives gives rise to tensions and concerns. In his talk at Leiden University, Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (Education, Culture and Science) said we should talk more about science’s relationship with society and political decision-making.

University lecturer of modern Dutch literature Rick Honings, associated with the Faculty of Humanities, has received a Vidi grant of 800,000 euros. This allows him to carry out research into a more nuanced image of our colonial past.