Do you have to be able to say everything on Twitter and Facebook? Is Instagram morally obliged to remove photos from attacks? Should we allow the terrorist group to recruit new members on the internet?

The aim of this research is to define the relationship between sources of articulation for different kinds of instrument in the period between the beginning of XVI century (first extant indications) and the end of XVIII century.

This study investigates the perception and production of emotional prosody by native and non-native listeners and speakers, i.e. Chinese and Dutch listeners and speakers, including Dutch L2 learners of Chinese.

Of course, Jan Melissen is proud of the publication of his new book. Even so, one painful memory lingers: because of American interference, he was forced to remove the chapter on citizen diplomacy, diversity and inclusion. ‘It did affect me.’

Performances of solo keyboard repertoire can sound more or less polyphonic depending on the performer’s use of divergence in expression.

On 12 November Ingrid Leijten was a guest on Dutch NOS NPO Radio 1 programme Met het Oog op Morgen. She was asked to speak about the right to freedom of expression.

Music and language both communicate through sound, including timing and pitch. While language mainly conveys semantic meaning, instrumental music does not, and is typically seen as expressing emotion. This project investigates how well listeners recognize intended expressive feelings in music, instructed…

Promotores: J.N. Kok, H.J. Hoogeboom

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Sasse, van Breen, Spears & Gordijn demonstrated an anger gap in response to sexism which was larger for women than for men and found evidence that expressed anger was associated with instrumental concerns.

The Europa Institute has invited Dorjana Bojanovska from Macedonia to visit Leiden Law School to conduct her master thesis research from 6 March - 31 March 2017. Dorjana is a student at the Comparative Constitutional Law program at the Legal Studies Department of the Central European University. The…

Jurisprudence is a philosophical introduction to the law. This subject is taught by the department of Jurisprudence.

Prof. Mark Leiser and a team of thirteen law students from Leiden University’s Advanced LLM programmes in European and International Human Rights Law as well as in Law and Digital Technologies together drafted a report for the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom…

On the 31 March 2022 Mr. Taufiq Hanafi successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This PhD project investigates what the universal and variable morphosyntactic properties of linguistic expressions of otherness are and how they can be modelled theoretically.

In this article, Sophie Vériter examines the EU’s unprecedented ban on Russian state media following the invasion of Ukraine, using securitisation theory

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

President Putin will be officially opening the Netherlands–Russia Year on 8 April in Amsterdam. Leiden Slavist Sjeng Scheijen was responsible for putting together the cultural programme. How much freedom did he have in doing so? ‘The Dutch photography project on the demolition of Sochi districts was…

Promotores: T.H.W. Bäck, A. Plaat, Co-promotor: F.J. Verbeek

Press freedom in Indonesia is still under pressure, despite the demise of Soeharto’s regime in 1998

This multidisciplinary project aims to deliver new antibiotics to target the WHO priority pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae, one of the most dangerous pathogens in the clinic today.

When a foreign book is translated for the Chinese market, there is a good chance that not all of the text will make it into the new version. With an NWO XS grant, university lecturer Svetlana Kharchenkova will investigate how foreign authors deal with this censorship.

Authorities in Denmark and Sweden are examining whether it is possible to ban Quran burning following recent incidents. These have caused tension in many Islamic countries as well as in the countries where they occurred.

Nucleoid associated proteins maintain the architecture of the bacterial chromosome and regulate gene expression, hinting that their role as transcription factors may involve local three-dimensional chromosome re-modelling.

In recent decades, the Netherlands’ struggle with multiculturalism has caused an upsurge in public interest in the relationship between state and religion. In this, the Dutch address a subject relevant not just to them, but to all of Europe.

Promotor: P.J.J. Hooykaas, Co-Promotores: P.B.F. Ouwerkerk, M. Wang

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2026.

NETHATE is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) project seeking to investigate the roots, societal impact and mitigation strategies of hate in offline and online foras.

De ophef rond het geplande optreden van Kanye West in Arnhem groeit, maar juridisch gezien kan de burgemeester dat niet zomaar tegenhouden. Volgens Adriaan Wierenga, noodrechtspecialist bij de afdeling Staats- en bestuursrecht en tevens werkzaam aan de RUG, botsen zulke ingrepen al snel met fundamentele…

Online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) have become part and parcel of everyday media use. Journalists incorporate posts from politicians into newspaper reports, scientists share their insights in short posts or videos, and the judiciary uses social media to explain their…

How do you recount historic events if you are not allowed to talk about them? For his dissertation, Taufiq Hanafi tried to find out how a period of mass murder – despite heavy censorship – found a place in Indonesian literature. PhD defence 31 March.

eLaw at Leiden University leads Europe in exploring the intersection of law and digital technologies.

This thesis describes the use of bioorthogonal proteins in immunological settings. It provides an introduction towards the field of protein modification, which was used throughout the thesis for the expression of proteins containing unnatural amino acids.

The master’s degree programme Education and Child Studies (Research) is an academic, not a vocational programme. It offers research based knowledge about education and child development.

This research will focus on the relationship between the musical structure and musical time in the performance of 19th century music.

Democracy in Action is a Horizon Europe-funded initiative exploring how grassroots movements, cultural spaces, and digital innovations can strengthen democratic participation. With a special focus on youth, women, ethnic minorities and night culture, we bring together researchers, grassroots movements,…

The experiments described in this thesis employ local lentiviral knockdowns in brain areas of female zebra finches followed by behavioural assays consisting of preference and Go/Nogo tasks.

Is criminal disenfranchisement compatible with a democratic political order? This article considers this question in light of a recently developed view that criminal disenfranchisement is justified because it expresses our commitment to democratic values.

The main aim of this research is to understand the dynamics of identity within indigenous Caribbean communities as expressed through the practice of intentional cranial modification. A multidisciplinary approach will be applied to achieve this aim, combining current anthropological and sociological…

Stam defended his dissertation ‘Freedom of speech and the suppression of discrimination in the Netherlands: a constitutional-developmental approach’ on 12 November 2025. The doctoral research was supervised by Afshan Ellian and Bastiaan Rijpkema

Participation in research programmes

This project employs a systematic experimental approach to examine the interaction of these two hitherto independent lines of research (tone sandhi and focus realization) in six dialects of Chinese, which lie on a continuum between dialects with dense tonal distributions and sparser distributions. In…

My PhD project studies how the temporally sequential Hox gene expression is regulated during head-tail patterning of the frog embryo.

What is emotion in human and nonhuman animals? How do emotions get to expression and how do they impact on our interactions, our decisions to trust, distrust or cooperate? Why do we mimic and synchronise affective processes?

The objective of this study was to investigate the expression and function of GRHL2 in different breast cancer subtypes.

How do plant defense genes get activated?