On the 24th of May, Brenda Assendelft successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Brenda on this achievement!

On 29 April 2016 Rick Honings' book 'De dichter als idool. Literaire roem in de negentiende eeuw' (The poet as pop star) was presented.

In the Netherlands, levying tax on inheritances at death has been a fact of life for centuries. The presumed double taxation and its sad precursor are elements of the discussion about the levy of this inheritance tax, but so too are the possibilities to reduce the tax through ingenious legal constru…

De onstuitbare opmars van de N.V. Zuid-Korea. (in Dutch).

Een bouwhistorische studie naar kapconstructies op Leidse huizen tusen 1300 en 1800

On 30 October 2019, Paul Jager defended his thesis 'De concern(genoten)enquête'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. S.M. Bartman and Prof. M.E. Koppenol-Laforce.

Duurzaamheid op de campus, energietransitie, groen, circulair

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes; World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting.

On 22–24 October 2025, Leiden University welcomed scholars, policymakers and higher education leaders for the Una Europa Conference on Academic Freedom. Organised by the AFITE project team and supported by Una Europa Seed Funding 2024, the three-day programme examined current pressures on academic freedom…

In this course, we will focus on the fascinating history of the Arabic Medieval World. We will take you on a journey through the Middle Ages. All along, we will present you with historiographical debates and dilemmas and travel back and forth in time explaining to you how events of the past affected…

Zuzana Vikarská joined the Europa Institute in January 2021 as a visiting researcher within the re:constitution fellowship - a new programme funded by Stiftung Mercator comprising 20 fellows who have their own project. The fellows meet regularly to discuss work in progress and engage in academic mobility…

Earlier this month, the Europa Institute organized an internal discussion on the German PSPP-judgment. For the first time, the German Constitutional Court declared acts of EU institutions as manifestly excessive and thus as ultra vires acts under German constitutional law. During an online debate, various…

Luuk van Middelaar, Professor of Foundations and Practice of the European Union and its Institutions, recently wrote an op-ed in Dutch daily newspaper NRC.

This dissertation contains the further development of a method for linguistic-stylistic research, which provides a systematic means to interpret global impressions of a text through choices in formulation at word- and sentence level.

Fish climbing trees, storks taking care of their parents… Premodern textual and visual culture presents us with a fabulous bestiary that reveals ingenious and rich reflections on the animal kingdom.

Michiel Pronk defended his thesis on 30 March 2016

This book aims to understand cultural transitions and negotiations between art and politics from 1989 to 2020 through analysis of a series of Cuban novels.

The Dutch prefix ge- in historical perspective gives first of all a general account of the development of the word formation processes involving ge- in which special attention is paid to the participial ge-.

ASLU 29 Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen, Valentina Raffa (2015)

This seminal volume covers the entire global history of urbanization since the rise of cities in Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC. Leiden historians Wim Blockmans, Leonard Blussé, Luuk de Ligt and Leo Lucassen contributed survey and thematic chapters.

How was the future United Nations Organization promoted to global publics during WW II?

The tenth Europa Lecture was delivered by Corinna Wissels, State Councillor at the Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Dutch Council of State, deputy justice of the Dutch Trade and Industry Appeals Tribunal and member of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement arbitration panel.

In de uitzending van Café Kockelmann op18 april werd aandacht besteed aan twee belangrijke politieke thema’s: het vertrek van Pieter Omtzigt na 21 jaar uit politiek Den Haag en de roerige totstandkoming van de voorjaarsnota. Wim Voermans, hoogleraar Staatsrecht, was te gast in de uitzending.

In Nieuwsuur ging Michael Klos, docent/onderzoeker bij de Universiteit Leiden, ging bij Nieuwsuur in op ‘de Twitterfiles’.

Per 1 september 2021 is de stad Leiden een heuse stadscriminoloog rijker. Marianne Franken gaat in een vier jaar durend promotieproject onderzoek doen naar de veiligheidsbeleving van Leidse burgers.

Unemployed and work-disabled people fear the new Dutch cabinet's plans to reduce benefits. Social security law experts, including Barend Barentsen, warn in ‘NRC’ of a sharp drop in income and cast doubt on the legal viability of the plan.

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Hankemeier, Co-Promotores: T. Reijmers, L. Coulier

Valedictory lecture

Over the last three decades, the discovery of exoplanets has revealed the boundless variety of worlds beyond our own Solar System⁠. Majority of planetary systems contain short-period planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune⁠.

This book investigates how the rulers of the Habsburg world empire developed and implemented a central maritime policy for the Netherlands and appointed an admiral of the sea or admiral-general for that purpose.

French is a global language. It is spoken on every continent and serves as an official language for many international organisations (NATO, UN, WHO). In this minor, you improve your language skills, study French from a linguistic perspective, and immerse yourself in the rich global Francophone culture…

Lecture

One of the three long-term research interests of our group concerns the Transformation of the Roman World (c AD 450-900).

The renovation of the Aleida Nijland building (previously Matthias de Vrieshof) is the fourth project in the development of the Humanities Campus. Renovating these buildings will enable the university to provide a sustainable Campus with modern facilities and an attractive educational environment that…

Social Information Processing in Children with and without Hearing Loss

This dissertation sheds light on politics, education and linguistic identity by studying the case of the College of Jerusalem, founded by the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

In this PhD project, we focus on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of LMs with narrative data.

Dividing Worlds: Tsunamis, Seawalls, and Ontological Politics in Northeast Japan

Addressing the core novel objective of scalably assessing the impact of possible interventions through counterfactual prediction based on spatio-temporal data.

A remarkable population of short period transiting rocky exoplanets with equilibrium temperatures on the order of 2,000 K has recently been discovered.

Every month a member of the Institute for History tells about a book that inspired him or her. Afterwards, the pen is passed on to another colleague. This month dr. Meike de Goede tells about the book 'Between Tides' by Valentin Mudimbe. The novel, little known beyond the circles of Africanists and…

How De Haan is using language in general and his specific style of language in particular to provide truth, solidarity and justice for both the individual and the collective?

A project aimed at understanding the complicated process of religious transformation in one of the centres of the early Muslim world.

On 25 September 2019, Luuk Esser defended his thesis 'De strafbaarstelling van mensenhandel ontrafeld'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. C.P.M. Cleiren and Prof. J.M. ten Voorde.

On 23 oktober 2018, Elsemieke Daalder defended her doctoral thesis 'De rechtspraakverzamelingen van Julius Paulus'. The doctoral research was supervised by prof. mr. W.J. Zwalve and Prof. mr. E. Koops.

PhD defence

An examination of rationales and core practices of first-grade Worldview/Religious Education teachers focused on their students' philosophical identity development