On the 6th of March 2023, Santino Regilme presented his work-in-progress titled 'Global Drug Wars: Contested Normative Orders of Peace, Security, and Human Rights'. If the battle against illegal drugs is construed as a war, how is victory in such a war defined and constructed? If the oppositional…

The war in Ukraine has lasted almost two weeks now. What does Putin expect to achieve with his invasion and how big is the chance that the West will get involved? We phoned André Gerrits, professor and expert on Russia.

On 27 september historian Adam Zamoyski held a captivating lecture on his new book Napoleon: the Man behind the Myth. During this lecture, which was an initiative by Polen in Beeld and the Central and Eastern European Studies Center, Zamoyski answered the question: ‘what were the Napoleonic Wars really…

PhD defence

From 2 to 5 September 2015, Leiden served as the stage for one of the world’s largest linguistics conferences: the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) 2015 Annual Meeting. Marianne Mithun, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and outgoing president of the SLE, is not surprised that…

Getting started with active learning & teaching can be as simple as assessing on what is already accomplished. Here are some practical courses of action to begin experimenting with active learning, whether you are a teacher or responsible for the spaces.

Is our musicality unique? To find out, the Bird Singalong Project brings together singing parrots from all over the world. Do you have a parrot that sings or whistles along to songs and would you like to help us? Sing up now!

Sarah Giest and Annemarie Samuels, both Assistant Professors at Leiden University, researched the quality and coverage of the data being collected for policiymakers to be used, specifically pertaining to minority groups.

How were war heroes and war criminals created, and how do these images relate to the historical context?

‘Islam and Muslims are not something that happened to Europe; they are part of Europe. In fact, Islam is one the biggest constants in European history,’ argues Professor Maurits Berger in the new eight-part Matters of Humanities: History of Islam in Europe podcast series of the Leiden University Faculty…

What was the stringed instrument known in medieval and early Renaissance Italy as “cetra”?

The one-day symposium ‘War in Europe: the impact of Russian aggression in Ukraine two years on’ on 23 February 2024

Social and Behavioural Sciences, Education and Child Studies

Sandy Overgaauw has been awarded a 25,000 euro grant from the LUF for her research into PTSD in Syrian refugee children in the Netherlands. The research should lead to a screening method that can be used to determine which children are at higher risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD…

Until recently, the role of external information processing in intelligence has rarely been investigated quantitatively or experimentally. A group of researchers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leiden University, GGZ Rivierduinen, and University of Edinburgh measured in a new way how and when people…

What was the stringed instrument known in medieval and early Renaissance Italy as “cetra”?

In her capacity as a lawyer and expert in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Professor Helen Duffy is filing a lawsuit against the Dutch State. Leiden University’s weekly newspaper Mare reports that through her role, Duffy is assisting a Palestinian Dutchman whose family was killed in…

In this opinion article published in World Development, the authors present five research and policy priorities. While it is clear that ‘pluriversal’ designs need to guide the way forward (Kothari et al 2019), defining a set of key pillars can provide direction and purpose across this pluriversality.…

The World of the Fullo takes a detailed look at the fullers, craftsmen who dealt with high-quality garments, of Roman Italy. Analyzing the social and economic worlds in which the fullers lived and worked, it tells the story of their economic circumstances, the way they organized their workshops, the…

In Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, Emeritus Professor Mineke Schipper reflects on myths about ‘the end’.

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world, when, how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities?

A portrait of the complex historical process of over 500 years of European colonialism in the New World.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

What forms does Muslim religiosity take in daily life? What is the relation between representations of Islam and Muslims by scholars and the views that exist in the ‘real world’?

UNESCO has recognized an international set of fifteen manuscripts about Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe and the three Hikayat Aceh manuscripts as World Heritage. The manuscripts are inscribed in the global UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This list contains documentary heritage…

This book published by Oxford University Press discusses religion and trade in world history.

Imagining the Americas in Print contains eleven essays, seven of which have been published before and four of which are new.

Sheltering is an immediate human need and determines well-being andhealth.

Frank van Vree, Emeritus Professor of War, Conflict and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UVA), is the new Cleveringa Professor at Leiden University this year.

Medicines can work even if they have no active ingredient. The first international scientific conference on placebos will take place in Leiden from 2 to 4 April. Placebo researcher Andrea Evers, who is also chairing the conference, answers some pressing questions.

Why do historians so often talk about objectivity, empathy, and fair-mindedness? What roles do such personal qualities play in historical studies? And why does it make sense to call them virtues rather than skills or habits?

This book examines the critical role of information and knowledge in early modern Europe's global pursuits, exploring challenges in trusting distant information, the development of doubt in intercultural encounters, and the impact of misinformation.

Are there general principles or values that should govern our actions as moral agents and/or as political subjects?

In early medieval England, there was an interest in the history of the Roman Empire and kings adopted such imperial titles as 'imperator' or 'basileus'. How can we explain this interest and what functions did imperial ideas and the reception of the classical world serve in early medieval England?

This dissertation explores how domestic political power struggles in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War engaged with the ongoing conflict in Cyprus and aims to demonstrate how socialist parties in Greece and Turkey struggled with the concept of the “nation” in battling for power and political positioning…

Gert Oostindie, Emeritus Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History, is this year’s Cleveringa Professor at Leiden University. He was appointed by the University on 4 October. In his inaugural lecture on 24 November, entitled Courage and Disregard, he will talk about (academic) freedom in relation…

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Machine Learning is becoming a more and more substantial technology for industry.

Carl Li defended his thesis on 30 June 2015

On 9 June 2020, Maral Darouei defended her thesis 'Managing a sustainable career in the contemporary world of work: Personal choices and contextual challenges'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.I. van der Rest.

On 26 November historian Jan Grabowski and sociologist Barbara Engelking will both give the Cleveringa Lecture. They wrote a book about the Holocaust in Poland and were taken to court for defamation.

This dissertation studies the construction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a cultural icon in American memory, particularly by FDR himself.

The war in Ukraine is entering a new phase with the announcement of a partial Russian military mobilisation and the intention to annex four Ukrainian regions. Why is Putin making these decisions just now and what consequences will they have for the course of the war? We talk to professor and Russia…