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.

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.

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…

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!

Researchers have used AI to reconstruct the rules of a board game carved into a stone found in the Dutch city of Heerlen. The team concludes that this type of game was played several centuries earlier than previously assumed.

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.

On Monday 26 February the terrible news reached us that our gifted former Egyptology student – and former student assistant at the Leids Papyrologisch Instituut – Juan Archidona Ramírez had succumbed to cancer.

Frans de Haas, professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and Director of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy, will join the management team of the MI on a temporary basis, in any event until 1 January 2022, in the role of Scientific Director-Change Manager.

The bachelor programmes German Language and Culture, Classics, Dutch Language and Culture, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Religious studies and Linguistics have received the predicate top rated programme from the Keuzegids.

Conference

An alumnus who wishes to remain anonymous has endowed a named fund to support Dr Miriam Müller’s historical and archaeological research on the earliest periods of Egyptian civilisation.

Lecture

This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Hugh Kennedy from SOAS University of London to Leiden. He is the fourth Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University.

This year marks a special occasion because it was just ten years ago that the Georgian language was taught for the first time at Leiden University. It is even more exciting that its first professor, Ramaz Kurdadze, will return to Leiden this year to teach students interested in the language. Kurdadze…

For thousands of years, the prehistoric communities of the Low Countries followed their own path, compared with the rest of Europe. An international research team has now published these findings in Nature.

Translating ancient texts, filling in missing parts of clay tablets: articles are popping up more and more often about the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence for researching documents in the oldest scripts. Are we better off leaving the deciphering of ancient texts to computers from now…

Expert in Classics Renske Janssen has been awarded a Rubicon grant. She will use the grant to conduct research at the University of Edinburgh into how Roman law was perceived by society at the time.

An evening program in the University Library and Middle Eastern Library in Leiden for everyone who has something to do with the Middle East; from Tajikistan to the Mahreb and from Istanbul to Sanaa. View the oldest books and clay tablets from the collection and listen to the most fascinating stories…

In September 2023, Geert Ham started working at the Institute for History as a PhD candidate within the ERC-funded project 'Anchoring Innovation'. Below he introduces himself.

Four projects led by the Faculty of Humanities have been awarded KIEM grants. The researchers will receive €10,000 to carry out their plans.

The PhD track involves many different aspects. As well as important administrative steps that you have to take, for example, there are also introductory activities, a training programme and opportunities for research abroad.

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.

Historian Paul van Trigt and Arabist Peter Webb have been awarded Consolidator Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). This grant of up to two million euros will allow them to consolidate their research team or programme.

When asked about the mission of the Leiden Jewish Studies network, Jürgen Zangenberg, Professor of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity at Leiden University, and one of the organizers of the event says: “We try to keep the network as broad as possible, and to attract as many people from the outside…

Buying chocolates as a sign of love, getting the best deals on Black Friday and putting on a spooky costume for Halloween. In recent years, these holidays and traditions have taken off in the Netherlands, even though they originated on the other side of the ocean. Why are we so excited about American…

Rafał Matuszewski has been elected Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) in recognition of his academic leadership and outstanding scientific achievements in the fields of ancient Greek history and classics.

Three programmes at the Faculty of Humanities have been awarded medals by EW and ResearchNed. The bachelor’s in German Language and Culture took gold, and the bachelor's in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and the master's in Middle Eastern Studies each earned a bronze medal.

Dr. Rafal Matuszewski, assistant professor at the ancient history department of the Institute for History, has been awarded an Early Career Partnership by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Five master's programmes from the Faculty of Humanities scored highly in Keuzegids 2026.

The story of Tutankhamun, the Egyptian pharaoh, is world famous. But did you know that the Ancient Egyptians mummified not only people but animals too? The National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden recently put a bunch of animal mummies through a CT scanner. This was in collaboration with Canon Netherlands…

Festival, Study trip Greek and Roman History 2026