'Academics who share their knowledge with the outside world on social media are often insulted or even threatened. Especially female academics and academics of colour seem to regularly be the victim of sexist and racist comments.' This is what Ineke Sluiter, Professor of Greek Language and Literature…

Spycraft, by professor Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman has been selected by History Today and The Economist as one of 2024’s best books

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Lecture

Aprovechando la conferencia Spinoza, Nanne Timmer, Universitair Docent LUCAS, le hace unas preguntas a la escritora y Premio Reina Sofía Gioconda Belli sobre su poesía y su lugar en la Nicaragua de hoy.

Since 1 January Leiden has a new graduate school. The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), previously based at the University of Amsterdam, has moved to the Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

Translating poetry is notoriously difficult. Translating poetry in such a way that the humorous nature of a poem remains intact is even more difficult, even though it is precisely jokes that can encourage children to read more, notes PhD candidate Alice Morta.

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

Arts and culture

Middle East Studies Lecture

In 2024, Professor Joanita Vroom received a substantial grant from the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) in support for her Hinterlands of Medieval Chalcis Project (HMC Project) in Greece. PHI, a California-based non-profit organization, is dedicated to archaeological research as well as to the preservation…

Leiden researchers Tazuko van Berkel (Greek and Latin Language and Culture) and Noel de Miranda (Tumour Immunology, LUMC) will join the KNAW’s Young Academy next year. They will be inducted on 22 March 2021.

When hobby divers revisited a nearly 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Texel, they discovered more than 1,000 objects in wooden boxes. Eight years later, postdoc Janet Dickinson used recovered books to compile a profile of the mysterious owner.

University lecturer Tazuko van Berkel is one of this year's laureates of the Ammodo Science Award. The award includes a sum of 350,000 euros that she can use as she wishes to explore new avenues in basic scientific research.

Six programmes in the Faculty of Humanities have been awarded the designation 'top programme' by the Keuzegids. These are the bachelor’s in German Language and Culture, Greek and Latin Language and Culture, Latin American Studies, Ancient Near East Studies, Religious Studies and Russian Studies.

For the annual Week of Classics, Dr Marike van Aerde and her team made a documentary about their research project Routes of Exchange, Roots of Connectivity. In the film the team touches upon the interactions of Greeks and Romans with the wider ancient world, ranging from the African kingdom of Aksum…

The Executive Board has appointed Ineke Sluiter and Arnold Tukker as distinguished professors at Leiden University.

What does it sound like when you create your own words in Chichewa? Can you decipher hieroglyphs after just one workshop? Visitors found answers to these and many other questions during the first edition of the Evening of Languages, held in the brand-new Herta Mohr Building. With a sold-out programme,…

Who doesn't love to turn on a horror film on a rainy evening? Fortunately, it is only fiction - or is it? According to university lecturer Evert Jan van Leeuwen, modern horror says more about our society than we think. He has been nominated for the Klokhuis Science Prize for his research into addiction…

Professor Peter Bisschop has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. He will invest the 2.5 million euros in his research into puranas: ancient texts, commonly written in Sanskrit, that are up to fifteen hundred years old.

What do you do if you have a book from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but you suspect that the binding contains a fragment of a medieval manuscript? University lecturer Thijs Porck has received an NWO grant to experiment with a camera attached to a tube. 'The project boils down to keyhole surgeries…

On February 10, 2026, emeritus Professor Dr. Takamitsu Muraoka (1938–2026) passed away, one day after celebrating his 88th birthday. From 1991 until his retirement in 2003, he held the chair of Hebrew Language and Culture, Israelite Antiquities, and Ugaritic at Leiden University.

Manon Post and Efstathia Dionysopoulou recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate and postdoc in the framework of the 'Anchoring Innovation' program. Below, they introduce themselves!

Three Leiden students will be sharing their knowledge of history while playing video games. The livestreams are part of the ‘Streaming the Past’ project and will be available on the popular streaming platform Twitch. The first livestream will be on Thursday 20 May.

Assistant professor Ancient History Rafal Matuszewski has been honored with the prestigious 2026 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This distinguished award, accompanied by 60,000 € in funding, recognizes Matuszewski’s outstanding contributions to research…

Leiden University is awarding an honorary doctorate to virologist Marc van Ranst. Van Ranst has been one of the main advisers of the Belgian government during the Covid pandemic. German Arabist Beatrice Gründler will also receive an honorary doctorate for her work in the field of Oriental Manuscript…

The Chlorakas Palloures Excavation on Cyprus, run by Dr Bleda Düring, was featured on Cypriot national television. In the item Düring had the chance to explain the importance of the site and highlight the team's finds.

University lecturer Lucien van Beek has been awarded a LUF Praesidium Libertatis Grant. He will use the sum of 75,000 euros to research the thinking of people in ancient and prehistoric times. To do that, he will look for unusual or striking metaphors in the earliest Indo-European languages.

Parliamentary democracy is under severe strain, says Hélène Landemore. Her solution is surprisingly simple: allow ordinary citizens to replace professional lawmakers. On 22 June, she presented her argument for the future of democracy to students and staff in The Hague.

More focus on diversity in Antiquity, workshops for students with disabilities, and a card game to share stories about diversity: these and other projects will receive funding from the JEDI Fund in 2023.

Assistant Professor Anna Dlabacova has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. She will use this grant of around 1.5 million euros to conduct research on the Dutch vernacular ‘book of hours’.

Who was professionally involved in language between 1550 and 1650? And what were the financial returns of this language sector? Assistant Professor Alisa van de Haar has received an ERC Starting Grant to map out the situation in Northwest Europe between 1550 and 1650.

Conference