The Modern and Contemporary Cluster is the largest within LUCAS and home to more than 100 staff members and PhD candidates.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

Gold Matters: Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: A Multi-Actor and Trans-Regional Perspective.This project explores whether a transformative approach towards sustainability can arise in Artisanal and Smallscale Gold Mining (ASGM).

Nanoparticles exhibit a number of adjustable properties, e.g., their size, shape, and surface and core chemistry, which can be further diversified with different functional moieties. This opens a broad field for application in diagnostic and therapy. In this respect, the use of a polymeric hybrid material,…

Consumer societies are a global presence, and marketing practices have spread to all corners of the world. However, the loud and glaring performances of the big advertising companies and the hegemony of shopping malls makes us forget that there are many different markets, and many merchants who have…

This research project analyses the use of different, often competing, stereotypical images of Rome in Humanist Latin Poetry, by considering it as strategic appropriation of the classical heritage.

The APL (Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia) is published once a year and showcases the increasingly diversity of research conducted at the Faculty of Archaeology. The APL currently forms a showcase for the faculty as a whole in which all employees can publish their research. By alternatingly publishing…

How can we bridge the gap between experts and the general public?

The goal of this book is to place architectural studies, in which people’s interactions with each other and material resources are key, at the crossing of both landscape studies and material culture studies, where it belongs.

Silk Road Virtual Museum - A virtual museum of the art and culture of the regions that lay on the trade routes between Europe and Asia, popularly known as the ‘Silk Road’.

MaDiTraCe’s main goal is to enlarge and integrate the portfolio of technological solutions reinforcing the reliability of critical raw material (CRM) tracing and the transparency of complex supply chains.

Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums is a large-scale research project funded through the Dutch National Research Agenda, and led by Wayne Modest and Susan Legêne (Vrije Universiteit). Work Package 3 on “Value” phrases its main research question as follows:…

How does the presence of internally displaced people impact on the justice and security concerns of longer-term residents in host communities, and to what extent do residents have different concerns than displaced?

In this publication, May Tamimova and Tahir Abbas researched the existing literature about violence and hatred against places of worship.

This liber amicorum is a tribute to Prof. dr. ir. Hans H. de Iongh, associate professsor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) of Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Antwerp, on the occasion of his retirement on 27 October 2016.

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

This project investigates the transposition of natural historical material, knowledge and vision, between different media (collection, scientific drawing, academic texts, the visual arts and/or literature) – a transmission that happens in the borderline between the traditional, emblematic worldview…

Steering soil microbiomes for better crop quality: the holy grail to improve human health?

We live in a data-drenched society awash with numbers. An inhabitant of the democratic polis of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.) increasingly found himself surrounded by numerical data. This project aims to analyze the communicative functions and the political meaning(s) ascribed to these public…

Can playing certain games decrease cognitive decline or even enhance cognitive performance in the aging population?

Sharing Collections and Connecting Histories

A selection of news from Leiden University.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies Leiden (IPS) aims to advance the understanding of placebo and nocebo effects, their underlying mechanisms, and their potential applications in clinical practice. IPS consists of a group of interdisciplinary researchers working at Leiden University with…

This edited volume suggests promising new avenues of research in analyzing coalition politics. Written by a group of leading scholars, the book clarifies a number of concepts too often taken for granted in the existing literature, performs theoretically-driven and methodologically novel comparative…

When we are in a conversation, how do we know exactly when to respond, and how do we manage to respond so swiftly, yet without interrupting our interlocutors? Can speech melody – in particular utterance final “boundary tones” – help us determine who will speak next, or are these cues too late in the…

Effectiveness of an early intervention program for anxiety-prone toddlers in the Netherlands

What are the genes and molecular mechanisms involved in bacteria-mediated plant drought tolerance?

How can the emergence of primary justice systems be facilitated and furthered?

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

Our ability to learn and control movements is essential for engaging in goal-directed behaviour. From buttoning your shirt and driving a car, to cooking dinner and brushing your teeth -- our actions in daily life rely on this ability.

This thesis contains results on the arithmetic and geometry of del Pezzo surfaces of degree 1.In Chapter 1 we give the necessary background, assuming the reader is familiar with algebraic geometry.

The AiChemist project (https://aichemist.eu) coordinated by Helmholtz Munich is an Innovative Doctoral Training Network funded through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA-DN) within the EU Horizon Research Framework, to the sum of €3 million. It brings together leading experts in AI, chemoinformatics…

Research question

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) offers two grants that may support PhD candidates.

This work sets out to investigate the form and function of the imperative in the Rigveda. The morphology (and, where relevant, etymology), syntax and semantics of the imperative are covered.

How do we approach education that facilitates creative confidence for students that leads to innovative solutions to society’s present day and future sustainability challenges? This education research project tackles a sustainability dilemma faced by households in everyday life viz.

Hegemony and World Order explores a key question for our tumultuous times of multiple global crises.

This research area is focused on the development and application of novel concepts and models in the emerging area of quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP).

The car we buy is made out of thousands of components, which are produced using different types of materials. These materials need to be sourced from different places, sent to production facilities and assembled. Once the car is dismissed, the components need to be taken care of by either reusing, recycling…

Death, fire and identity in North-West Europe

How can the combination of sound composition, astrochemistry, and epistemological analysis provide new and unexpected insights into interstellar chemical reactivity?

Terms used by literary critics in characterizing the style of novels are often impressionistic (‘baroque’, ‘austere’, ‘vivid’, ‘cerebral’ etc.). Foundations for such evaluations are usually not provided. A scientific way of studying and explaining style is lacking in present day Dutch Studies. Suzanne…

In this project, we plan to combine two strands of research in speech processing: (a) the impact of prosody on speech processing and (b) the impact of musical training on speech processing. In our project we will test 8 year-old children with different degrees of musical training: (a) primary school…

How did learned natural historical inquiries into the underwater world develop in eighteenth-century Europe?

In a rapidly changing world it is crucial that our teaching keeps pace with the dynamics of society.

Public policy is often the subject-matter of pervasive and deep moral disagreement. Moral disagreement, understood as the difference and opposition between principled moral arguments, can and does occur between policy professionals, different political parties and individuals or groups that compose…

Many students have difficulties to read and give meaning to algebraic formulas. In this study it is explored whether graphing formulas with pen and paper will improve students’ability to reason with algebraic formulas.

How to understand the simultaneously dis- and reappearance of letters in contemporary culture, and how does this Neo-Epistolarity relate to media-technological change?

Correctly interpreting the patterns of fire evidence in the archaeological record will illuminate the origin of human fire use.

What is the role of local authorities and communities in shaping how inter-Schengen borders are understood and dealt with?