Every year in February, ninety students who love making music come together in Someren, a town in the Dutch province of North Brabant. Through rehearsals and festivities over ten days, they transform into the latest version of the Dutch Student Orchestra (NSO), which then performs concerts in the Netherlands…

Lecture, Global Questions Seminar

PhD defence

Aafje de Roest turned her hobby into her job. She went from a teenager who enjoyed listening to hip hop music to a PhD candidate who focuses on how Dutch hip hop music shapes the cultural identity of young people in the Netherlands.

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).

Melinda Susanto is appointed as PhD candidate at the Institute for History since April 2020. She introduces herself below.

Louie Buana, a PhD candidate at the Institute for History, has been awarded the 5th Philippus Corts Fund grant, together with Wengki Ariando and Adrian Perkasa, for their joint book project 'Whose Nusantara? New narratives on decolonizing Indonesian knowledge and archipelagic futures'. The goal of the…

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.

Of the 150 elected representatives, 24 studied or conducted their PhD research in Leiden. Who are they and which degrees are most popular among these MPs?

Middle East Studies Lecture

University lecturer Laurie Cosmo, having grown up in New York, came to the Hague from Rome, Italy, where she fell under the spell of the Kunstmuseum. ‘I loved the building even before I worked at Leiden University.’

Seven researchers from Leiden University have made a successful application to the Open Competition SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) XS, a Dutch Research Council pilot programme.

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.

Lecture, COGLOSS x GLOBALISE Webinar

No fewer than 55 applications were submitted for a Kiem seed grant, an initiative for developing new interdisciplinary, interfaculty research partnerships and encounters. The draw took place on Monday for the allocation of 22 seed grants. The Executive Board was so impressed with the number of applications…

Lecture, China Seminar

PhD defence

Dutch and Flemish partners, including Leiden University, are joining forces as the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) in the fight against the spread of fake news, and have received the support of the European Commission.

When do we say violence was used in an incident? The answer may seem obvious at first. But interim results from a study by Jolien van Breen show that Dutch people are labelling events in increasingly broad contexts as violent.

Not passed your Dutch exam? Then there’s no HAVO (Higher General Secondary) or VWO (pre-university) diploma for you, says the Inspectorate of Education's Inspector General. This comment fuels a discussion on an exam that is already under fire. The final exam for Dutch is said to be uninspiring, too…

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Vidi grants to Leiden researchers.

Is your strategic vote actually strategic? How can the Netherlands form a stable government? And what should the next government do about migration, defence and the housing crisis? This is what our experts have to say.

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.

The Netherlands returned 478 artefacts to Indonesia and Sri Lanka this week, on the advice of a Dutch committee. Rightly so, says Leiden professor Pieter ter Keurs from the Museums, Collections and Society interdisciplinary research programme. ‘But do make it clear why you are returning something.’

The ROBUST consortium, which is the initiative of the Innovation Center for Artificial intelligence (ICAI), has received 25 million euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to strengthen fundamental AI research.

Education

The excuses for the slavery past? It would have been better if the cabinet had taken some more time on that, thinks university lecturer and Atlantic slavery expert Karwan Fatah-Black. 'Too bad they didn’t wait for the results of the study.'

Judith Pollmann, Professor of Early Modern Dutch History, has been awarded the Spinoza Prize. ‘An unbelievable honour.’

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Lecture

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…

Lecture, Annual Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture

Organisation

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.