The archaeological heritage of South America is facing increasing threats due to the expansion of agricultural activities, infrastructure expansion, illegal wood harvesting, and the current fire emergency plaguing the Amazon and other biomes of the continent.

Researchers using remote sensing technologies have characterized pre-Columbian regularly-shaped earthworks in forests in Central America and the Amazon. In tropical forested mountains in South America, two challenges arise when identifying archaeological sites through remote sensing. Firstly, sites…

The winner of the Paul & Tatiana Ehrenfest physics thesis prize 2020 is Koen Bastiaans. He carried out his PhD research in the group of Milan Allan and defended his thesis in December 2019 cum laude at Leiden University.

To improve our teaching and reward excellent teaching assistants, the institute offers a Teaching Assistant Prize to the best teaching assistant of the semester.

This project, South American population history revisited: multidisciplinary perspectives on the Upper Amazon (SAPPHIRE), investigates population dynamics in western South America on the basis of traces in the geographical, genetic, archaeological, ethnological, and linguistic record.

Escalating tensions in South China Sea have epitomized US–China relations for nearly a decade. Warning signs of a possible collision between a rising China and steadfast US, bring to light the need to think about ways that can halt and reverse the intensification of their confrontational moves.

Early Childhood Community Practitioners’ analyses of new mother’s challenges in Alexandra Township South Africa: a collaboration between academics and practitioners

People need to get to know each other to see the positive side of migration, according to photographer and documentary maker Koen Suidgeest. Since the end of September, Suidgeest has been the new city photographer for the region of Leiden. His goal is to photograph as many cultural identities as possible…

Who is funding African science? How are different African and international funders interacting and contributing to develop scientific research in the continent? Are there potential inadvertent synergies among research funders that can be identified? These and similar questions are at the heart of this…

The Gulf is a major global destination for migrant workers, with a majority of these workers coming from South Asia. In this book, a team of international contributors examine the often-overlooked complex governance of this migration corridor. Going beyond state-centric analysis, the contributors present…

On the 10th of November, Sara Petrollino succesfully defended her PhD-thesis and graduated. LUCL congratulates Sara on this great result.

An environmental and palaeo-economic reconstruction.

This book is the first systematic analysis of the changes in the use of goods and services by households of Black South Africans since the early nineteenth century.

On 1 June 2022, Bruno Braak defended his thesis entitled 'Overcoming ruptures: Zande identity, governance, and tradition during cycles of war and displacement in South Sudan and Uganda (2014-2019).' The doctoral research was supervised by Prof.dr. J.M. Otto, Dr.ir. C.I.M. Jacobs, and Dr. C. Leonardi…

On Wednesday 14 February 2024 Yorum Beekman successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Anyone who has taken a walk through the centre of Leiden before might have come across him, an attentive group of tourists gathered around. After studying history, Koen van Toen, or Koen Marijt, started his own business. He now organises historical walks, among other things.

Koen de Ceuster, university lecturer for Korea Studies at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, was interviewed on the NKNews Podcast about art in North Korea. He speaks about the role of art in North Korean society, art ‘business’, and argues why it is not possible to separate propaganda…

Last monday, the fourth edition of the HOPweek kicked-off. During this week, new students of Leiden University that will study in The Hague will get to know new people, their study, study associations and The Hague. HOPweek 2019 was officially opened during the opening ceremony in the Great Church (De…

This project combines an extensive new open database on linguistic distributions, spatial modelling and areal linguistics in order to disentangle the roles of social and environmental factors on the emergence of linguistic diversity patterns of South America.

At the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), scholars have been studying the Indian subcontinent with attention and expertise for more than 100 years. This part of South Asia is an economic giant with a population of over two billion. Nira Wickramasinghe, Professor of Modern South Asian Studies,…

On Tuesday, December 9 2025, Prof. Koen Ottenheyn delivered the last Austria Centre lunch talk of 2025. Prof. Ottenheyn serves as a professor of architectural history at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Academic Curatorium which advises…

Former President Kgalema Motlanthe of South Africa gave a public lecture on Campus The Hague on 7 July. His story was about the economic transformation of Africa.

On Monday 21 November a lecture was given at Leiden Law School of Leiden University by Belgian Minister of Justice Koen Geens and Dutch Minister of Justice and Security Ard van der Steur in which they talked about international judicial cooperation. The lecture focussed on cooperation between the Netherlands…

The renovation of the South Cluster has been in full swing over the recent period. As the completion date approaches, no later than 1 April, we're excited to provide you with a glimpse of the current state of the building.

What are the conditions under which coercive diplomacy can compel a State to abandon its controversial nuclear (weapons) program? Based on the experience of the US coercive diplomacy against the nuclear programs of three countries, namely Iran, Libya and South Africa, Jean Yves Ndzana’s PhD research…

Het is nog lastig in te schatten wat de gevolgen zijn van de aangekondigde bezuinigingen. Een week na Prinsjesdag kan decaan Koen Caminada al wel wat vragen van binnen FGGA beantwoorden. ‘We staan er relatief goed voor, maar de gevolgen kunnen groot zijn.’

Two MEPs visited Leiden University on Friday 30 January. Their visit underscored the vital importance of the university’s expertise on Africa, Asia and Latin America in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.

Lydie Cabane, Assistant Professor in Governance of Crises at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, recently published the book The Government of Disasters. In this book Lydie explores how the South African state bureaucracy reacts to disasters.

Aron is a second-year student of Korean Studies. He was in Seoul as part of the stay-abroad portion of the program when Leiden University took measures due to the coronavirus. He and his fellow students decided to let the last flight back to the Netherlands pass to stay in South Korea.

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.

This comparative study investigates court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a unique combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research…

In this book Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later.

Ramesh Ganohariti will examine legal identity in three post-Soviet aspirant states and outline four common scenarios in this article.

Although official law generally conceives of personal injury victims as individual rights holders, the actual experience of physical injury and its consequences is relational. Indeed, many researchers in the global North as well as the global South have contended that the very concept of the Self should…

What are the conditions under which coercive diplomacy can compel a State to abandon its nuclear weapons program?

This book explores the Indian tradition of liberalism through a critical intellectual biography of Valangaiman Sankaranarayana Srinivasa Sastri (1869–1946).

South Korean smash hit Squid Game is on track to becoming the most successful Netflix production ever. The series is number one in over 90 countries. Professor and Korea expert Remco Breuker can see why South Korean pop culture is becoming so popular, also outside Asia.

The SRON space research institute, Leiden University and the TU Delft are appointing six researchers to jointly carry out space research. The research will focus on exoplanets, the evolution of structure in the Universe and technology for developing new pioneering space instruments.

In the eighties the Umhlatuzana rock shelter in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, was excavated. Results from this excavation led to an understanding when the Later Stone Age started in this area. This archaeological period is often associated with the structural presence of modern human behavior. Now a…

Lecture

Erik de Maaker wrote a monograph on how Garo, an indigenous community of the extended eastern Himalayas, experience and negotiate such disparities. The book shows how relatedness is reinterpreted as religious practices change, and communally held land ends up being privately controlled. Erik de Maaker…

In the book 'Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka' Nira Wickramasinghe, professor of Modern South Asian Studies, uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world. She was interviewed about the book in the New Books in South East Asian…

Black Theatre, activist theatre by and for black South Africans, flourished under apartheid. However, according to Francis Rangoajane, the democratisation of South Africa has in no way diminished the importance of this art form. PhD defence 16 November.