Leiden alumnus and writer Tomas Lieske has published a novel which is set in the house of Paul Ehrenfest. Ehrenfest was a famous physicist who organized round table events every Wednesday evening at his home in Leiden in the early twentieth century. The big names from modern physics frequented these…

The ‘right’ amount of dopamine in the brain makes study participants better at solving certain cognitive tasks. This is the conclusion of Bryant Jongkees after experiments and a literature review. PhD defence on 21 February.

Over 600 manuscripts and early prints have been made digitally available by Leiden University Libraries (UBL) via the Europeana platform. In the project 'The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages’ (ARMA), seven European heritage institutions added 30,000 digitised medieval items to Europeana’s database…

In two weeks' time, the official opening of the Humanities Hub will take place in the Huizinga Building. The first projects have already begun. Professor Journalism and New Media Jaap de Jong and director of the AI and Digital Humanities Lab Jelena Prokic share their experiences.

Leiden psychologists receive an Outreach Grant from the Young Academy Leiden (YAL) to talk about facts and fables in their field of research. Marieke Bos, Lara Wierenga, Marit Ruitenberg and Sanne Willems will receive up to €1000 to realise their project.

Missing legends, illogical connections or three-dimensional graphs. There are many ways in which data can deceive. Five students took up the fight against misleading statistics. Their lesson series can now be found online.

Are you looking for some listening material for the upcoming long weekend? Staff members and alumni of the Faculty of Humanities have been creating various podcasts over the last few months. A selection is shown here:

Nikie Veld is an education coordinator at Biology. Her job now mainly revolves around getting students back to the Faculty. ‘In the corona era, we were constantly rearranging the timetables.’

2024 was an eventful year for the Faculty of Humanities. Despite becoming the centre of political discussion and budget cuts as faculty ourselves, exceptional research projects were carried out and new initiatives were launched.

On Monday 10 December, the Polish Commissioner for Human Rights dr. Adam Bodnar delivered the eighth Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture on Human Rights at Leiden Law School. The event marked the annual celebration of International Human Rights Day, which was proclaimed to commemorate…

Meticulous analysis of hundreds of photographic plates from the star J1407 between 1890 and 2007 show no stellar eclipses. Robin Mentel, a master student at Leiden University, could not detect eclipses of the star J1407 by a planet hypothesized to have giant rings, called J1407b. However, an eclipse…

Leiden Professor Richard Griffiths received the Outstanding Educator Award for Innovation during the annual Coursera Partner Conference on 22 March. The conference was hosted by Leiden University in the World Forum in The Hague and was attended by 500 participants from more than a hundred leading universities.…

On 1 February 2014 the second issue of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference, titled 'Death: Ritual, Representation and Remembrance', was published.

Young people being deployed to carry out explosive attacks: how do they come into view, and what motivates them? The podcast 'Action/Reaction: From Attack to Approach' by the research project Close Protection and Surveillance and researcher Sheila Adjiembaks takes a closer look at why and how young…

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

The magazine 'De kracht van (on)macht' was published in January 2025 as part of the NWA research project 'Crafting Resilience'. It marks the start of a series of seven publications. This edition focuses safety and security for vulnerable groups in society.

On Thursday 16 November, the Europa Institute had the honour of receiving HE Jana Reinišová, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the Netherlands. She delivered a speech in the framework of the European Union Seminar Series, jointly organized by the master’s programme in International Relations, the…

Jason Rudall, Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, has published a monograph entitled 'Responsibility for Environmental Damage'.

On Thursday 26 October, the Europa Institute held its fourth ‘Meet the Author’ event.

What do you want your children to learn from you? How can parents teach their teenagers responsibility? Do children understand differences between rules at home and at school ?

ILS organizes a new lunch seminar series where all researchers from Leiden Law School can present their research. The idea is to hear in a simple and nice way what researchers from other research programs and institutes are working on. During a seminar two or three speakers will present their research.…

Missiles that travel at approximately six thousand kilometres per hour, up to 5 or 6 times the speed of sound. Has Russia used those against Ukraine and how is that possible? In Leiden University’s Dutch video series ‘De Werkplaats’, Danny Pronk, political scientist, security expert, and researcher…

During this semester, the University of Vienna offers the 19th lecture series on Gender Studies. On 21 November 2017, Christa Tobler, Professor of European Law at the Universities of Basel (Switzerland) and Leiden, gave a lecture on the subject of multiple discrimination, including also sex.

In mei 2025 verscheen 'De beloning van curatoren bij lege boedels', een onderzoek van Universiteit Leiden en SEO Economisch Onderzoek naar de knelpunten in curatorenfinanciering bij lege boedels.

Data Science seminar at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs

Leiden scholars succeeded in making Arabic accessible to Western academic communities as early as the sixteenth century. But how did they approach this problem?

In the journal series European Drama and Performance Studies, Jed Wentz has edited issue n° 19 - Historical Acting Techniques and the 21st-Century Body.

We are excited to announce the book publication of our alumnus Dr. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay: The Auditory Setting Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts.

Leiden scholars study clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. But what exactly does the cuneiform script say?

What is involved in setting up and carrying out clinical research? To give researchers a helping hand, LUMC Campus The Hague has brought together tips and tricks in the new massive open online course (MOOC) Population Health: Study Design.

We have the pleasure of hosting organisational psychologist Fieke Harinck. Fieke is an expert on negotiation, communication skills and improvisation and co-author of the book ‘The Art of Presenting’. She shares invaluable insights and advice on how to deliver impactful presentations that captivate your…

On October 19, the annual Benelux Algorithm Programming Contest took place in Nijmegen. The team ‘git merge -s octopus solution cup’ of Leiden University was the only one to succeed in solving all the problems. They became champion of the Benelux and ensured their place in the championship of Northwest…

As of today, Maartje van der Woude (Professor of Sociology of Law, Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance & Society) has become a member of the advisory board for Oxford Law’s research platform Border Criminologies.

The Washington Post reviews Nationalism by university lecturer Eric Storm. In this book, Storm explores how nation-states became the dominant political organizational form.

The NWO (The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) awarded prof. Joost van Batenburg with the Vici grant 2015 for his research project ‘Real-time 3D Tomography’.

Prof.dr. Henk te Velde is appointed as the new President of the Association for Political History.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (OM) is to investigate whether comments made by 'Forum voor Democratie' MP Gideon van Meijeren about going to parliament to protest are punishable. How should the political centre in The Hague respond?

Fenneke Sysling has recently launched a podcast: Het Gemeten Zelf (in Dutch). This five-part podcast series explores the history of self-tracking.

On the evening of Tuesday January 31st, the physics institute organizes its triannual meeting for over seventy high school teachers. The program consists of lectures on developments in modern physics and the latest initiatives in the world of education.

Pieterskerk and Leiden University are closely connected. The University was founded in Pieterskerk and to this day we celebrate that at the University’s annual Dies Natalis. Much has to be done to get the church ready for this special day. A photo series behind the scenes.

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

The annual Orpheus Doctoral Conference, organised by the second year docARTES PhD students, will take place on 28 and 29 May 2020. The call for proposals is now open. Proposals for presentations of any kind are welcomed: from scholarly papers to performances.

Universe Awareness (UNAWE) started a crowdfunding campaign together with Design & Data GmbH, with a central role for the plush 'astronaut' Rosetta. This stuffed toy is used for interactive classes, in order to teach pupils across the world about astronomy and space sciences.

'Adjacent Sound' is the new album by composer and ACPA PhD Gabriel Paiuk.

On Wednesday 2 November, the Europa Institute held its first ‘Meet the Author’ event. In the context of this new event series external academics come to Leiden to discuss a recent publication by their hand. The event typically starts with a conversation between a member of the Europa Institute and the…

What, and especially who has formed the city The Hague? Wim Willems, professor Social History and director of the Modern Urban Studies (MUS) Institute, writes about it in his series of historical and autobiographic books about The Hague.

2017 was our year for new developments. Namely, the opening of our new Wijnhaven, our first debates in the StepTalks series and with a view to the future of our students, our first Career Event. This was our year in 12 photos.

On Thursday 30 March, the Europa Institute held its second ‘Meet the Author’ event.

In the series “Ambassador’s Lecture”, KU Leuven regularly invites distinguished members of the diplomatic community and high-level members of international organisations.

Over the past two centuries, the concept of human dignity has moved from the fringes to the centre of the international legal system. This book is the first single-authored detailed historical, theoretical and legal investigation of human dignity as a normative value, the intellectual sources that shaped…