How do students start asking more questions on a museum visit? Let them free an Egyptian princess from a sarcophagus! In the minor Living Education Lab, students from TU Delft, Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam designed an escaperoom.

Over 600 manuscripts and early prints have been made digitally available by Leiden University Libraries (UBL) via the Europeana platform. In the project 'The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages’ (ARMA), seven European heritage institutions added 30,000 digitised medieval items to Europeana’s database…

The human trafficking of Eritrean refugees is a booming business, where money is made with smuggling people, but also using violence, hostage situations and even torture. Modern communication methods like money transfer via mobile phones play a vital role in this, conclude professor Mirjam van Reisen…

Manuscripts that look like a comic book, that's how you could describe the manuscripts of the Dongba people from China. The manuscripts are one of the last examples of a so-called pictographic script that can only be interpreted by Dongba priests, shamans, who have knowledge of the ancient Dongba cu…

As Scaliger professor, Erik Kwakkel is responsible for the academic context of the complete Special Collections of the Leiden University Library. His inaugural lecture on 15 May will focus mainly on the section closest to his heart: Medieval books.

Interculturality, diversity and digital skills. These were themes on which lecturers shared their experiences during expert meetings on educational innovation. During each meeting, six instructors gave a short presentation on their respective projects. This was followed by a discussion in which they…

Since November 2019 Stephan Raaijmakers is Professor by special appointment of Communicative AI (Artificial Intelligence) at LUCL. Raaijmakers investigates how linguistics can help make Artificial Intelligence smarter.

Understanding what our buildings and cities are made of is an important step in making them more sustainable. Industrial ecologist Tomer Fishman (CML) has received an ERC Starting Grant to map the construction materials used in buildings in the Global South. 'Without the data, you can't formulate po…

Finds uncovered in the east of Germany show that Neanderthals stored and preserved vast amounts of meat and/or temporarily aggregated in larger groups to exploit the spoils

Alumni event, Lezing

Lecture, CMGI Brown Bag Seminar

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

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.

When the tokay gecko loses its tail, a new one grows from resident stem cells at the stump. Each tissue type - muscle, bone, blood vessels and skin - develops from specific stem cells. This discovery by Luthfi Nurhidayat holds potential implications for advancing regenerative medicine in humans. Nurhidayat…

The illicit trade in stolen cultural property is booming. Countless works of art and antiquities will be lost if we don’t do more to stop this. This is what experts warned at a Leiden Global congress at the National Museum of Antiquities.

This February Metje Postma will stop teaching and retire. But she is not done with the discipline yet: she will finish her PhD and there are still five films on the shelf that she plans to complete.

Eleven lecturers from Leiden University have been awarded Comenius grants that will allow them to work with their teams on an innovation project within their own teaching. They have been awarded three grants of 100,000 euros within the Senior Fellows programme and four grants of 50,000 euros within…

Lecture

Lecture

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.

Conference

The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The way of Intersectionality. This project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility within their organization, collection, and exhibition spaces that meets the breadth of demands placed by today’s “critical visitors.” Fifteen…

By far the majority of users of child sexual abuse networks (or child porn forums as they are sometimes called) on the dark web do not actively communicate there but download illegal material, therefore committing a criminal offence. But they often stay under the police and judiciary’s radar. PhD candidate…

Lecture

Middle East Studies Lecture

We are living through an age in which social media platforms have given way to entirely new forms of politics and politicking. It is no exaggeration to say: there is a before and after social media.

A Leiden University Day, new agreements on exchanging PhD students and a keynote speech by Geert de Snoo at a popular symposium. In November, a Faculty of Science delegation paid a fruitful visit to eight universities in China.

Three lecturers from Leiden University have been awarded a €100,000 Comenius Teaching grant within the Senior Fellows programme. A further two lecturers have been awarded a €50,000 grant within the Teaching Fellows programme. The grants will enable the lecturers and their project teams to realise an…

Five researchers from Leiden University have been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). This grant of on average 1.5m euros enables researchers who show potential to start their own project, lead a research team and implement their best ideas.

Three decades ago, cyber-diplomacy did not exist. The interest in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a vector of change in international relations was limited to a few mostly technical organisations, and a restricted number of states.

Faculty of Archaeology opened its doors to welcome over 100 archaeology and living archaeology enthusiasts from all over the Netherlands

From closed government systems in the Middle East to an exceptionally open Dutch government. Public administration lecturer Alex Ingrams is an expert on transparency: ‘Why are some countries secretive? And what role does technology play?’

European dependence on Russian gas, earthquake damage in Groningen and the changing climate: the call for an energy transition is getting louder. This transition will be accompanied by an increasing demand for 'new' raw materials. The Geo-Resources for the Future minor looks at exactly that developm…

Connecting scientific fields, enhancing research and teaching, and providing innovative solutions to complex social issues: that is the idea behind interdisciplinary research. What did the university achieve in 2024? A small sample.