Sara Polak is a University Lecturer in American Studies and Modern English Literature at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She is PI of the ERC Project Worlding America: How Play Shaped the United States from New Media to Politics, 1503-2028.

Frans Willem Korsten is a Professor Literature, Culture and Law at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Five researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an Open Competition Domain Science ENW XS grant by the Dutch Research Council for their research projects.

As part of a wish fulfilment from Make-A-Wish, Leiden University recently welcomed a very special guest. Together with her best friend, Yuliia participated in a practical session on February 24th, where they studied the brain of a calf.

Few details, relatively few words. The coalition agreement presented is one of the shortest in the past 20 years, Arco Timmermans knows. Consequently, the outlines were not negotiated for very long, which has its advantages and disadvantages. 'Over the next few weeks, we are mainly going to see the…

University lecturer Casper Wits wrote an opinion piece on the ongoing diplomatic tensions between the European Union and China for POLITICO. In this article, he argues that 'rather than shrinking from the fight, the EU must develop a China policy that prioritizes progressive values and human rights.…

Giles Scott Smith is Dean of Leiden University College The Hague.

Iyute Deborah Oyuu is a PhD candidate and as a Deaf person, she uses Sign language to communicate. Iyute Deborah is attached to Through the Hands of Signers Project which is under the coordination of Dr. Victoria Nyst from the Department of Linguistics. Iyute Deborah is a Sign Language & Disability…

Alp Yenen is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He works primarily on the political history of modern Turkey and the Middle East. He is specialized on the turn of the 20th century, First World War, Interwar period, and the Cold War period. He also comments and…

This summer, political scientist Thijs Vos received the Kaare Strøm prize for his paper ‘Power or Ideology? What structures legislative voting behaviour in Dutch municipal councils, ideology or coalition-opposition dynamics?' He was awarded the prize during the ECPR summer school on parliaments in F…

Tony Foster is a Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

Kiki Spaninks is associated with the Plant Cluster as a teacher and researcher. Her teaching activities include several BSc courses in the field of Molecular Biotechnology. Her research is aimed at investigating the shoot-to-root signaling molecules during various aspects of plant development.

Other facilities

A minor allows you to develop your knowledge beyond the boundaries of your study programme, or to specialise further in your own field of study. You can follow a minor in Leiden and also in Delft or Rotterdam.

Lecture, Economic and Social History Brown Bag Seminar

Pepita Hesselberth is Assistant Professor Film, Literary and Media Studies at Leiden University, and research fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Lecture, Peace Histories Seminar Series

A group of postdoc and PhDs at our Focus on Emotions lab organized an escape room for staff and students to increase their awareness of diversity and accessibility matters. It was designed particularly for this year’s EUniWell FestiWell, which ran under the headline “Towards global sustainable well-being”.…

The left is gaining more and more ground on the political map of Latin America, with the elections in Colombia as the most recent example. But what’s behind this pull to the left? Professor of Modern Latin American History Patricio Silva talks about the current political situation in the region.

On June 16, 2025, the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University hosted a panel debate about the ongoing mass student-led protests in Serbia. The protests have shaken the increasingly illiberal regime in Serbia to its core and have grown into the largest student protests in Europe since 196…

Over a century ago, Alexandra van Elroy's great-grandfather left for Japan, where her grandmother was born. Together with her mother, Maaike van der Loon, she reminisces about her family history, through which a key thread is the study of Japanese and Chinese.

Lecture

Lecture, CHiLL series

Are you working at Leiden University and researching migration regimes outside of the Global North? Are you interested in doing fieldwork or a research visit at one of our partner universities? Then you might want to join the Leiden team of the EU-funded Marie Curie Staff Exchange Network on non-western…

Assistant Professor Juan Masullo of the Institute of Political Science has been awarded the 2025 Alexander George Best Article Award for his work on interviews and process tracing.

From 2018, Anne Gerritsen holds the Chair of Asian Art at Leiden University. This position is generously sponsored by the Royal Asian Art Society in the Netherlands, Hulsewé Wazniewski Foundation, Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation, Foundation for the Study of China at Leiden University, and the Jan Menze…

Yiya Chen is a Professor of Phonetics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She studies the sounds of languages with an interdisciplinary approach. The broad goal of her research is to understand the language structures and cognitive mechanisms that underlie speech and speech communication.…

Lindsay Black is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Rodrigo Ochigame is an assistant professor in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Their research examines unorthodox models of computational rationality, such as nonclassical logics from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines from India, and frameworks of…

The Economist published an article about a working paper about the effects of democratic elections on satisfaction with democracy. The paper was written by Dimiter Koshkov, Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration and Honorata Mazepus, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security…

On 24 April 2025, political scientist Pawan Kumar Sen will defend his PhD dissertation, "Transforming Nepal’s Political System: Party Positions and Public Opinion (2004-2012)," at Leiden University. His research examines how Nepal’s major political parties navigated key state restructuring reforms—republicanism,…

Antoaneta Dimitrova's research brings together different lines of inquiry relating to governance transfer across national borders. An enduring theme in her work has been the effect of the European Union on the democratic and market transformations of the post-communist states of Central and Eastern…

Do you want to request a change to the academic requirements set by your bachelor's or master's programme? Perhaps you want to be exempted from a particular course, because you think you have already acquired the knowledge elsewhere. Or do you want academic credits earned at another institution to be…

Research

Americans are electing a new president in November but they also have other choices to make in the polling booth. Alumnus Sanne Rijkhoff works at a Texas university and is trying to help make students more aware of the elections.

Katharina Natter of the Institute of Political Science has been awarded the 2025 IMR Book Review Award for her book on migration politics in Morocco and Tunisia.

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure