Peter Pels, affiliated with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology of Leiden University, is one of the researchers. Together with Birgit Meyer (UU), he will lead the work package 'Heritage and the Question of Conversion'.

As one of the first environmental scientists ever, Arnold Tukker received the honorary doctorate at Linköping University on Saturday 12 November. This Swedish university awarded Tukker for his scientific work to establish a circular economy.

Leiden University will be conferring three honorary doctorates in its special anniversary year. They will be awarded to Eliot Higgins, truth finder and founder of Bellingcat, Bonnie Honig, expert in feminist theory and legal theory, and Kelly Chibale, professor of organic chemistry, who works on prevention…

Karwan Fatah-Black and Lauren Lauret are co-authors of Geketend voor Hollands Glorie (The Chains of Holland’s Glory) that studies the political and economic connections between South Holland and slavery. The findings of this research will be presented with Dr. Joris van den Tol (Radboud University)…

Attention to the colonial past may be increasing, but many aspects of it are still underexposed. Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in collaboration with, among others, Leiden researchers Anne-Marieke van der Wal-Rémy and Alicia Schrikker, therefore created a 'Canon of the Dutch Underexposed Past', which…

The nominees for the IRO thesis prize 2021 and for the Prof. Dr. J.Th.J. van den Berg prize 2021. Who wrote the best Political Science bachelor’s theses?

After the Second World War almost three million people emigrated from the Netherlands to countries such as Canada and Australia. The government information was anything but objective, Professor by Special Appointment of Dutch Studies/Dutch Literature Ton van Kalmthout concludes in his inaugural lect…

CML grants three Stans Awards each year, known as the best PhD paper, best student thesis and best outreach from the past year. The CML staff nominated students and colleagues and this year’s jury Prof.dr. Koos Biesmeijer and Prof.dr. Nicole de Voogd made the final decision.

From 6-8 April 2026 the conference "From the ground up: The politics of burial and memory in the early Islamic world" will take place in Cairo, Egypt. Deadline for sending in your abstract: 21 June 2025.

Zār jewellery from Egypt can be found in many museums and private collections in the West, but for a long time very little was known about it, except that it was used in rituals to protect against spirit possession. PhD candidate Sigrid van Roode has explored its history and discovered that the jewellery…

Six Leiden University members of staff recently received the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility grant for exchange projects with non-European partner universities. The total award of around 357,000 euros is used for approximately 50 international mobilities.

Six projects from the Faculty of Humanities recently received grants of up to 750,000 euros from the NWO Open Competition. Researchers involved tell how they will spend this money.

How can we safeguard children’s rights in conflict zones? The winners of the 2025 Children’s Rights Moot Court Competition, team 19 from O.P. Jindal Global University in India, show unique potential to bring about positive change in this area.

Seed funding to summer schools, research collaborations and joint degree programmes: in these ways and more, we’re creating impact as a partner in Una Europa, an alliance of 11 leading research universities. To wrap up the year, we asked six colleagues to reflect on what they’ve achieved through Una…

For decades, the trade in pocketbooks prescribing how to be a good Muslim flourished in East Africa, but in recent years the number of books in circulation has been declining. University lecturer Annachiara Raia is the recipient of an Impact Explorer grant to revive this tradition, in cooperation with…

In the 60s and 70s, Black Power groups were also active in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This is what PhD candidate Debby Esmeé de Vlugt has discovered.

From Persia and Arabia to North Africa: as early as the nineteenth century, there were Dutch people who used the camera themselves in various regions of the Middle East.

Over the last 5-6 years Burkina Faso has become seriously implicated in the rapid and dramatic changes in the geopolitical situation in the Sahel. The country, once reputed for its stability and safety, has come under the spotlight for the number of violent attacks and of internally displaced people.…

Lecture

It is with great sadness that we share the news that on Friday, May 3rd 2024, Carla Risseeuw, Professor emerita of CADS, passed away. Carla Irene Risseeuw retired as Professor of Intercultural Gender Studies from CADS in 2009 after a long and productive career.

Rüya Akdağ is part of a research team with the aim of further studying social anxiety. The Leiden psychologist receives the grant for her doctoral research on the role of emotions and cognition in the emergence and occurrence of social anxiety in adolescents.

Try to resolve the nitrogen problem, go on a regeneration journey or take part in psychological research: discover this and more at the new and improved 3 October University, ‘WetenschapsWarenMarkt’.

Explore how cultural heritage can proactively respond to global crises, from geopolitical conflicts to climate change, through innovative cross-cultural collaboration between Latin American stakeholders and Una Europa.

On January 28 and 29, 2021 the conference ‘Imperial Artefacts: History, Law and the Looting of Cultural Property’ took place online. This first of its kind event at Leiden University was an interdisciplinary online conference and brought together (post-)colonial historians, legal historians, curators,…

On the occasion of Euroscience Open Forum 2022, Professor Attiya Waris (Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Fiscal Law and Policy in Eastern Africa, University of Nairobi, Kenya), Professor Irma Mosquera Valderrama (Professor of Global Tax Governance, Lead Researcher GLOBTAXGOV ERC…

World history is often framed in terms of flows of people and migration: humans coming ‘out of Africa’, the spread of farmers in the Holocene, Phoenician and Greek diasporas over the ancient Mediterranean, the colonization of the world by Europeans from the 16th century onwards. Together with his Exeter…

Pratika Dewi recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate, as part of Carolien Stolte's ERC project 'Reconciling Peace: International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization, 1918-1970'. The project runs alongside Carolien Stolte's VIDI project 'Peace Palms. International Coalitions…

Matthew Canfield (Assistant Professor, Van Vollenhoven Institute) and Danielle Chevalier (Assistant Professor Law & Society, Van Vollenhoven Institute) both received XS Grants from the NWO Open Competition SSH for their respective research projects. These grants are a maximum of €50,000 and enable…

Education, Research

It took a while, but the new cabinet has now finally been appointed. Four members of Schoof I studied in Leiden. Who are they?

Starting September 2024, Amanda Henry has started a new role as Professor by Special Appointment on the Evolution of the Human Diet at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden. She will use this position to draw closer ties between the Faculty of Archaeology and Naturalis, and explore means for public…

The United Nations has declared May 22 the International Day for Biological Diversity. A moment of global reflection on everything on Earth and its indispensability. Anthropologist Marja Spierenburg stresses the importance of the interaction between natural and social sciences in addressing sustainability…

Fanny Wonu Veys was appointed Professor of Art and Material Culture of Oceania on 1 August. Time for an introduction.

Three PhD candidates from Leiden University have been awarded a Mosaic 2.0 scholarship for their PhD research. The Dutch Research Council (NWO) Mosaic 2.0 programme is aimed at an underrepresented group of graduates with a migrant background.

Congratulations to Sara de Wit and Miriam Waltz, who have just won a Leiden University Global Seed Fund. Their proposed project entails 'Climate Talks' to foster equitable exchange between indigenous knowledge systems and climate science.

Research

Luca Bruls has received a Catharina Halkes Fonds fellowship grant to finalize her fieldwork in Chad and Senegal and to complete her first ethnographic film.

It will be a summer filled with conferences at the Faculty of Humanities in Leiden. In the coming months, there will be something for everyone at the university, especially in the field of languages and cultures of Africa and the Middle East.

From Wednesday 20 October 2021 to Thursday 21 April 2022, Leiden Children’s Rights Observatory and the Centre for Constitutional Studies of the Supreme Court of Mexico organize an Online Webinar Series on Children’s Access to Justice and the Optional Protocol on a Communications Procedure (OP3)

From research on the first human ancestors to leave Africa to mathematical models in random disturbances. For Leiden researchers have been awarded a prestigious Vici grant by the Dutch Research Council.

Prof. Mark Leiser and a team of thirteen law students from Leiden University’s Advanced LLM programmes in European and International Human Rights Law as well as in Law and Digital Technologies together drafted a report for the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom…

Finally we know for sure that there is a black hole at the centre of our own galaxy. Today, astronomers unveiled the first ever photo of Sagittarius A*, a super-massive object at the centre of the Milky Way. This picture could only be taken thanks to the cooperation of telescopes worldwide.

All the information about the Leiden University Global Fund (LUGF) funding instrument is given here, specifically the seed funding options for collaboration with regional partners. The LUGF awards seed funding to support regional collaborative initiatives.

Research

Bruno Allahissem and Luca Bruls recently joined the Institute for History as PhD candidates in the NWO-funded project 'Digital warfare in the Sahel: popular networks of war and Cultural Violence', led by Mirjam de Bruijn and Jelena Prokic (LUCL). Below they introduce themselves.

Dr Amanda Henry has secured a prestigious Vici grant for her groundbreaking research project, Hominin FoodWays: Changing Diet and Food Processing Across Climate Frontiers. This five-year study, set to begin in September, aims to unravel the dietary adaptations of Eurasian hominins between 1.8 and 0.9…

From a queer art exhibition to a podcast about people with disabilities, the JEDI Fund this year again honored several projects that contribute to diversity and inclusion.