This Philosophy bachelor's programme offers perspectives from around the world. It will make you one of the next generation of students who will shape philosophy in the 21st century, ready to take on academic or professional challenges that call for critical thinking, analysis and argumentation skil…

The right medicine in the right dosage for every patient, that is something medical science aspires. 'Personalised medicine' is the term for that. But it does require a lot of research with patient data and that can be hard to get due to privacy legislation. Researchers Laura Zwep and Coen van Hasselt…

This book surveys a distinct human phenomenon in the history of the ancient Near East: individuals who were born males but, under various social and historical circumstances, their masculine identity was considered ambiguous. They bore specific titles and were engaged in cult or palace administration.…

How did parties as political organizations emerge?

Our Institute’s research focuses on ‘global vulnerabilities and social resilience’. Specifically, we highlight three interconnected themes: diversity, sustainability, and digitalisation.

Muslims have lived in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe for centuries. Their arrival in Western Europe, the two Americas and Australia is however relatively recent. Studying how Muslims relate to their Western environment (and vice versa) and the mutual influences of Western and Islamic philosophies…

The motto of the Institute for History is: ‘Global questions, local sources.’ Its researchers use local sources to find answers to major historical questions. Without historical analysis, it is impossible to understand and explain the issues in society today. Leiden itself has a rich history, with big…

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

Politics is about the authorised allocation of values: who gets what, when and how much? This question is relevant at many different levels, in many different places and in very different ways.

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.

This project tries to explain the persistence of this cultural repertoire by zooming in on (1) interaction between idioms (cultural repertoires) available to scholars at certain points in time, (2) mechanisms that help transmit repertoires across time and place, and (3) rhetorical purposes for which…

Does the political context (e.g., democracy vs. authoritarianism) influence what makes people perceive authorities as legitimate?

The central theme of the NWO-project ‘The Promise of Organization’ is the evolution of political organization during the 19th century. We focus on the enthusiasm, arguments and concrete activities of the organizers as well as the criticism offered by opponents of modern political organization.

How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

Diversity Outdoors seeks to investigate how social inequalities are embodied through a comparative analysis of participation in outdoor recreation in Europe. We ask: What are the effects of ethnoracial embodiment on sociocultural diversity in outdoor recreation? How are bodies constituted as in or out…

Research in Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science focuses on the dynamics and the interaction of political institutions, individual decision-making, and collective behaviour.

Conference, Call for papers

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

The revolutionary organizations in Paris and Berlin around 1848.

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

The master’s programme in Museum Studies at Leiden University is uniquely positioned at the intersection of Art History and Museum Studies. Informed by leading interdisciplinary research, this degree provides you with a strong academic foundation for a variety of careers in museums, galleries and heritage…

Atoms and molecules are the basic units of matter. If we keep dividing a bar of gold or a glass of water into smaller parts, at the end we are left with a single gold atom or a water molecule.

On 11 November 2021, Evelien Campfens defended the thesis 'Cross-border Claims to Cultural Objects'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. N.J. Schrijver and Prof. W.J. Veraart (VU Amsterdam).

On the 26th of September, Cosmas Rai Amenorvi successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Cosmas on this achievement!

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

This book looks to existential thinkers for reasons to hope immortal life could be worth living. It injects new arguments and insights into the debate about the desirability of immortality, and tackles related issues such as boredom, personal identity, technological progress, and the meaning of life…

The role of grave sets in Corded Ware and Bell Beaker funerary practices

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

Intelligence scholars have been struggling to find the conditions under which international intelligence cooperation occurs. Most focus on transactional motives and guaranteed returns, the so called ‘Quid pro Quo’. At the same time, trust is often mentioned as one of the foremost conditions, yet it…

Emotions play a key role in EU politics. This article examines how emotions influence the EU’s response to international crises and norm violations.

How are social structures of gender, religion and race/ethnicity learned and embodied in practices of movement?

What are the precise identities, possibilities and current practice examples of the various time frames in music and what bearings do they have individually and in combinations on the speed of the music?

This project asks how individuals and society dealt with personal memories of the Dutch Revolt: narrating, writing, explaining, understanding, and coming to terms with what happened by first and following generations.

Cultural biographies of persons, objects and 'natural' places in the Bronze Age of the Southern Netherlands, c. 2300-600 BC.

New article on popular culture influences on cybersecurity experts, available Open Access at Contemporary Security Policy, part of a special issue edited by dr. Myriam Dunn Cavelty.

In this thesis, the research focuses on the properties of dark matter and dark matter haloes and how they connect with the galaxies we can observe in the Universe.

Interaction between Legal Systems acknowledges that law-making and law enforcement are increasingly taking place on various levels: in a global context, in EU context, on a national level and in a private law framework. These levels influence each other, sometimes directly, on the basis of a hierarchical…

The external tissues of plants and animals are colonized by microbial communities termed microbiota. When organisms are exposed to environmental pollutants, these substances will therefore encounter microbiota at the exposure interface.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. Metastasis, the process by which cancer cells spread to other parts of the body, makes treatments less effective. It is important to unravel the mechanism of metastasis.

On 16 November 2022 ms. Eftychia Mylona successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This dissertation presents a legal geographical analysis of the heritage laws of the independent English-speaking islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

Misinformation has emerged as a major societal concern. But why do citizens contribute to the dissemination of falsehoods online?

Nuran Buket Cengiz defended her thesis on 13 June 2017

Observational, cognitive and physiological measurements in social contexts.