The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

This is the physics summer school of Leiden University. It is part of the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION). The summer school is intended for Bachelor (BSc) students in physics. It covers topics from quantum matter and optics, to biological & soft matter physics and cosmology and theoretical physics.…

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

Recent fieldwork at the vast desert region in north-eastern Jordan has revealed an immensely rich heritage of an area that is difficult to access and archaeologically less known. Professor Peter Akkermans was interviewed about his groundbreaking research in this area, known as the Black Desert.

They hurtle along at over a thousand kilometres per second: the fastest stars in the Milky Way. PhD candidate Fraser Evans conducted research into these elusive hypervelocity stars and discovered that they have a lot to teach us, about black holes and supernovae, for example.

With the help of software that mimics a human brain, ESA’s Gaia satellite spotted six stars zipping at high speed from the centre of our Galaxy to its outskirts. This could provide key information about some of the most obscure regions of the Milky Way.

PhD defence

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

International organisations that represent collaborations between States are becoming increasingly more powerful, and they have an increasing impact on our daily lives. For example, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg established that minors have a right to legal aid immediately following…

Inaugural lecture

The radio telescope LOFAR, with a major contribution from Leiden Observatory, has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made. Never before have so many cosmic radio sources been captured in a single survey: 13.7 million.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

The Netherlands is not particularly rich in ‘wild nature’. Comparatively, what we have is a lot of intensively used agricultural land. This means that from nature’s perspective there much to be gained by combining the ‘nature’ and ‘agriculture’ functions. Not an easy task in such a densely populated…

The various bodies involved in the administration of LIAS are listed below.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

This project explored the role of material culture, in casu painted plaster and its technologies, in expressing dynamic social identities and in forging complex interwoven human relationships in the context of the Middle to Late Bronze Age of the Aegean and East Mediterranean.

An overview of Professional Associations and Journals

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson

Outflows are crucially important for the gas budget and evolution of luminous star-forming galaxies and AGNs, with observed mass outflow rates of the same order as the star formation rate. Greater star formation and black hole growth lead to more intense feedback and outflows, resulting in self-regulated…

Following the Big Bang, structure in the Universe started collapsing under the force of gravity. This resulted in the formation of the first stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families—one knightly and one mercantile—with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and…

Kaveh Lahabi's lab explores the exotic physics of quantum materials, whose underlying physics seems to have more in common with elementary particles and black holes, than ordinary metals and semiconductors.

Multiple stars, that is two or more stars composing a gravitationally bound system, are common in the universe.

In his book The magic of healing, Willem van der Does talks about 14 pioneers in the history of psychiatry. These pioneers all had one thing in common: they started with a radical idea which led to great enthusiasm.

The Jeugdwerkgroep is a national astronomy association for young people who are interested in astronomy. The Leiden section organizes a monthly meeting in the Old Observatory Leiden.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

Elizabeth Stuart is one the most misrepresented – and underestimated – figures of the seventeenth century. Daughter of James VI & I, she was married to Frederick V, Elector Palatine in 1613 – they were crowned King and Queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be deposed and exiled to the Dutch Republic in…

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

In 'Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800', Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman, both of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and also affiliated with the History Institute of Leiden University, assemble an internationally acclaimed selection of authors,…

The radio sky harbours both galactic and extragalactic sources of arcminute- to degree-scale emission of various physical origins. To discover extragalactic diffuse emission in the Cosmic Web beyond galaxy clusters, one must image low–surface brightness structures amidst a sea of brighter compact fore-…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Zaanen, A. Parnachev

Team Economic and Social History

Although nanoparticles are extensively used in various applications like consumer products and have most probably entered the environment, little is known about the effects of these particles on living organisms.

Promotor: W. Jaffe, Co-promotor: K. Meisenheimer

The high velocity tail of the total velocity distribution of stars provides essential insight into fundamental properties of the Galaxy.

Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political turmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens.

Since the Second World War, intelligence and security services have played an important role in policy and decision making, particularly with regards to a state’s national security. In this minor programme you study both the organisations, their working methods, their analysis techniques, as well as…

From Apartheid in South-Africa to 9/11 in the United States: there is not a single culture that is not shaped by the memory of war or conflict. The minor Cultural Memory of War and Conflict focuses on how such memory cultures influence and shape societies today.

This Leiden Law School page provides various information on Diversity & Inclusion at the faculty. It explains why D&I are key objectives, lists our current D&I projects, and outlines the faculty’s plans for improvements in these areas.

How safe do you feel walking on the street in Leiden? Do you feel safe, or are there situations that make you feel unsafe in the city? These are questions that city criminologist Marianne Franken of Leiden University wants to find answers to. In collaboration with the municipality of Leiden and the…

Wim Willems and Hanneke Verbeek were awarded with the Die Haghe Prize of 2016 for their book ‘Hier woonden wij. Hoe een stad zijn Joodse verleden herontdekt’ (English: ‘This is where we lived. How a city re-discovers its Jewish past.’) It is an exciting book about the rise and fall of the Jewish community…

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

During the bachelor’s programme Astronomy you will immerse yourself in questions about our universe. Questions such as: ‘what happens in a black hole?’ and ‘what is dark matter?’ In doing so you will learn to apply mathematics and physics to astronomical problems and you will work with computer simulations…

The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers of European descent.

This publication of the School of Advanced Study of the University of London is one of the outcomes of the Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project and the Colonial Rural Networks project (NWO, Dr. T.D. Stek). The volume, edited by Tesse Stek and prof. Gert-Jan Burgers of the Free University Amsterdam,…