Since 1 October 2022, Sarah Nelson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History. Below she introduces herself.

Professor Nira Wickramasinghe has won the American Historical Association John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History for her book Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka' (Columbia University Press: New York 2020).

Shell Nigeria is liable for damages from oil spills in Nigeria. The Hague Court of Appeals gave this ruling in a case that was brought by four Nigerian farmers.

Dr Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor at eLaw – Center for Law and Digital Technologies, has been appointed Co-Rapporteur for a new joint project of the European Law Institute (ELI) and the American Law Institute (ALI): 'Principles for the Governance of Biometrics'. The project aims to formulate…

University lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe argues in The Guardian that the Republican's new agenda for a second Trump term is more radical than the first. He says that they seek to take control of federal agencies by replacing civil servants with ‘American First footsoldiers’.

Organisation

Mia Thomaïdou wants to investigate how criminal courts understand and use the increased knowledge of human behavior. Her Rubicon grant allows for two years of research at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice. Leiden behavioral scientist Thomaïdou will be living in New York, where as part…

In an interview on the website of the NWO, Sabine Luning, Marjo de Theije and Esther van de Camp talk about the gold miners they met in various African and South American countries and they come to new insights.

In Nieuwsuur ging Michael Klos, docent/onderzoeker bij de Universiteit Leiden, ging bij Nieuwsuur in op ‘de Twitterfiles’.

Working from your Leiden room with students from the United States: Univeristy Lecturer Dario Fazzi’ students will soon be able to take up this challenge. He receives a grant from the Faculty of Humanities and ECOLe to set up a ‘virtual exchange programme.

Satellites belonging to American space company SpaceX recently came very close to a Chinese space station. Experts are calling for traffic management rules in space.

For the second year in a row, LACDR organized an international symposium on molecular fold topology. An afternoon program centered around the theme “circuit topology”, inspired and connected mathematicians, physicists and chemists. Scientists from USA, Europe, and Asia participated in this online ev…

In a new Transforming Society article, Salvador Santino Regilme, Associate Professor and Chair of the International Relations Program at Leiden University, critiques the Trump administration’s US–China tariff war as a covert instrument of domestic class warfare.

The launch of the 'Toolkit for the Design and Effective Implementation of Domestic and International General Anti-avoidance Rules' generates strong interest among tax administrations.

Eurostat, the European statistical office, reports that inflation in the Eurozone has increased to 4.1 per cent. What are the implications for your wallet and your savings? And how can consumers respond?

If the Netherlands wants to change its reputation as a tax haven, it must do more according to Professor of Tax Law Jan van de Streek on American news site Bloomberg.

Het Amerikaanse hooggerechtshof oordeelde op 1 juli dat een president tijdens hun ambtsperiode een zekere immuniteit heeft. Zij zijn onschendbaar in geval van ‘officiële handelingen’. Tessa van Buchem uit haar zorgen en kritiek in het FD.

From March 11th to 14th, the workshop "The Future of Ethics in Caribbean Archaeology," led by IN THE SAME SEA Postdoctoral Fellow Felicia Fricke and her colleagues Eduardo Herrera Malatesta (Århus University, Denmark) and Maaike de Waal (Leiden University, The Netherlands) took place at the Saxo Institute…

In the context of Panama’s independence month, the Panamanian Embassy in the Kingdom of The Netherlands decided to recognize Natalia Donner’s contributions to the study of Panamanian history and culture, as well as her role in a massive repatriation project.

If you missed the annual LUCDH Winter School Week of Digital Humanities workshops and Pilot Project Symposium (27 – 31 January 2025) this time around, you’ll have a chance to take part next year. Save the dates for the last week of January 2026!

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

Leiden University has six top bachelor’s programmes, according to Keuzegids universiteiten 2024 consumer guide to universities published on 30 November 2023. This once again puts the university in third place among broad universities ranked according to top programmes.

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)

Lecture

In the Pioneers of Leiden University series, we talk to past and present students who were the first in their family to go to university. In this second instalment: historian and university lecturer Nadia Bouras (1981). ‘Although I only found out later that was my mother’s dream, it was as though I…

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.

NATO not only safeguards our security and stability, but also defends Enlightenment principles, promoting prosperity, health and freedom. This is what eminent psychologist and thinker Steven Pinker argued to a packed Great Auditorium.

Catherine Wood and Martijn van Ette recently joined the Institute for History as PhD candidates in the NWO Vidi-funded project "American foreign policy and liberalism", led by Andrew Gawthorpe. Below they introduce themselves.

American anthropologist Rosemary Joyce will be awarded an honorary doctorate from Leiden University on its Dies Natalis on 8 February. Joyce has delivered important new insights into the ancient Mayan cultures of Central America.

Hanan Hammad and Eftychia Mylona give a master class focusing on conceptual and methodological challenges in writing histories of marginalized social groups.

Assistant Professor Space Law Tanja Masson-Zwaan appeared as a guest on the Radio Weetlust programme of local Leiden radio station Sleutelstad FM. She talked about, among other things, who does the moon actually belong to and why we all would like to go there so badly.

Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos (Oxford University) and Juan Masullo Jimenez (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) are the new editors of Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (QMMR). QMMR is a biannual publication of the American Political Science Association (APSA) section for the study, development,…

Scientists have detected a neutrino with the highest energy ever measured. Leiden physicists Maarten de Jong and Dorothea Samtleben were involved in this project, which was widely covered in newspapers and online media last week.

It increasingly seems that Elon Musk has taken it upon himself to decide what can and cannot be said on Twitter. He bought the platform with the message that there would be room to say whatever you desired, but he himself is casting doubts on that principle.

The first fine for space debris has been issued. An American company that had failed to clean up its space junk has been fined $150.000.

Maartje van der Woude, together with Dr Irene Vega, has won the 2024 Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize for the article ‘Colourblindness across borders: The de-racialised logics of Dutch and American border agents’ in the journal Theoretical Criminology.

In two moving articles, Dutch newspaper Trouw has reported on the lengthy detention of Abu Zubaydah in Guantánamo Bay. Zubaydah was tortured over a period of many years. Helen Duffy, Professor of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, and also Zubaydah’s lawyer, recently booked a major victory…

The Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations CIAT and the GLOBTAXGOV project have published the 'Toolkit for the Design and Effective Implementation of Domestic and International General Anti-Avoidance Rules'.

The New Scholar, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal at the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University, is launching its first issue, and how? With a double issue!

The Executive Board of Leiden University has appointed Bart Joosen as Professor of Financial Law commencing on 1 July 2023. The chair is attached to the Hazelhoff Centre for Financial Law, part of the Institute of Private Law at Leiden Law School.

Towards the graduation ceremonies, you sense an increasing nervousness. Not only because all the tradition and glamour surrounding the event, also because that will be the day that the winner of the Political Science master’s thesis award will be announced. For 2022-2023, the jury is considering seven…

Associate Professor Carolien Stolte has been appointed visiting professor at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). Stolte will continue her research into global peace movements there during the coming semester.

Carmen Gonsalves has been the Dutch ambassador to Chile since this autumn. She studied history in Leiden. How useful has her degree been and what’s it like to be an ambassador? ‘Diplomacy is fascinating.’ We spoke to her just before the presidential elections.

Mojan Samadi obtained her PhD in 2020 in Leiden and has since remained at the university as an assistant professor. Her research currently focuses on gender and criminal law, with a key question being how criminal law should address femicide.

Working as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: for many students it would be their dream. Alumnus Tom Groot Haar is busy making it a reality. 'My career seems like a preconceived plan, but it wasn't.'

What with coronavirus, the American elections and the Brexit botheration, we had almost forgotten that something miraculous happened in 2020: the repressed people of Belarus rallied against dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for 26 years. Months later, what remains of the protest?…

He announced this news in a tweet earlier this month: 'Delighted to announce that I've been appointed Full Professor of Global Security and Technology'. So let's get more closely acquainted with Dennis Broeders (46), who explains why the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) is ideal for him,…

It doesn't happen every day that the research project of a first-year bachelor’s student results in a scientific publication. And not only that, but as first author and on the cover of a leading physics journal. ‘We have given our lab education a thorough overhaul and it is paying off.’