Long evenings and closed university buildings make a perfect combination for listening to podcasts. Over the past six months, staff, students and alumni of the Faculty of Humanities have once again produced some great work.

Lecture

Mirjam Oomens was working on her PhD research on language in the consulting room when she was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. Four years later, she has made it her mission to encourage doctors and other healthcare professionals to make fewer statements about life expectancy. 'Such a conviction can…

For the third year in a row, the bonfires in the Duindorp and Scheveningen neighbourhoods in The Hague during New Year's Eve have been cancelled. According to Professor Henk te Velde, the fight for the bonfires represents something bigger: angry citizens.

The world’s attention will shift to China as the Communist Party is set to hold its five-yearly congress beginning on 16 October. We talk to Senior University Lecturer Florian Schneider about how its leader Xi Jinping is expected to cement his place as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Ze…

What if seriously ill patients do not want to hear their diagnosis? Does a clinician always need to provide a patient with all available information? Communication researcher Liesbeth van Vliet, medical anthropologist Annemarie Samuels and research intern Fiona Brosig will put these questions on open…

For decades, a collection of ancient Mediterranean ceramics and artefacts served as a teaching resource for Archaeology students at the Leiden Faculty of Archaeology. Now, a selection of these objects has found a new audience at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, where Assistant Professor…

Master's student Vicente Fischer de Miranda Rodrigues is the winner of the KHMW Brewer Thesis Prize for History. He was awarded the prize for his research on donatism.

The Van Vollenhoven Institute is organising a year-long public lecture series entitled 'Reconsidering the Socio-Legal Gaze'. The lecture series aims to spark critical debates about the visions of justice and positions of power that inform Law and Society scholarship at Leiden and beyond.

Labour market reintegration: what is working and what could be done better? These questions were at the centre of Dutch BNR Nieuwsradio's podcast ‘Werkverkenners’. The podcast makers interviewed Anke Ramakers, Assistant Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, for answers…

Carlotta Rigotti, Postdoc researcher at eLaw, participated in the ‘Intersectional Fairness in AI: Legal Frameworks, Tools, and Learning Opportunities’ webinar on 10 December 2024.

Katharina Natter of the Institute of Political Science has been awarded the 2025 IMR Book Review Award for her book on migration politics in Morocco and Tunisia.

It is almost two and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine, but the conflict between the two countries has been going on for much longer. Central to it is the question of what it means to be Ukrainian. Guest researcher Viktoriia Ryhovanova teaches a course on the subject. Last academic year, the…

Professor Sjef Barbiers is leaving his job as scientific director of LUCL for the position of scientific director of the Institute for the Dutch Language (INT) from 1 September.

Last Tuesday was a special day: three researchers defended their PhD dissertations in succession as part of the same project. Martin Luther Darko, Kauthar Khamis and Rashida Adum-Atta investigated how people of different religions coexist in Madina in Ghana.

Two thousand years ago, the Middle East found itself caught between the rise of the Roman Empire in the west and the Parthian Empire in the east. PhD candidate Nolke Tasma has been awarded an NWO grant to investigate how local inhabitants experienced these changes.

Leiden University researchers will be working more closely with colleagues at Una Europa partner universities this year. Three research projects have been awarded up to €40,000 in Una Europa seed funding to explore questions related to democracy and AI, web tracking technologies and clean energy.

A group of astronomers led by Leiden PhD student Sebastian Zieba has discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that the rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c has a thin atmosphere. Although the planet is nearly identical to Venus in size and temperature, and was expected to have a thick atmosphere,…