Museum Boerhaave commemorated the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity with the exhibition ‘Einstein & Friends’. The exhibition shined light on the famous physicist’s Dutch friends and his love for Leiden. A review featuring seven images can be found below.

On 26 November 1940 Professor Cleveringa held his courageous speech protesting against the dismissal of his Jewish colleague, Professor Meijers. Cleveringa was arrested and the university was closed. Every year the university honours Cleveringa with a chair and meetings throughout the world.

Guus Kroonen is a teacher and researcher in the fields of Scandinavian, Germanic and Indo-European comparative linguistics. Etymology, reconstruction and phylogenetics as well as the study of prehistoric language contact and language dispersals are among his professional focuses. He has led multiple…

Joanne Stolk is a Lecturer in Greek papyrology and Coptic connected to the Leiden Centre for the Arts in Society and the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Christoph Pieper is a university lecturer at the Centre for the Arts in Society. After having studied Latin, German and Italian Literature in Bonn and Florence, he has been a Universiy Lecturer of Latin at Leiden University since 2006. His main research interests are Cicero and his afterlife (a theme…

Lennart Kruijer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology.

Peter Webb is University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University. He specialises in early Arabic poetry and prose, combining philology, literary analysis, and anthropological approaches to examine how poetic, narrative, and historiographical traditions shaped…

My research themes are Korean syntax, critical discourse analysis, second language acquisition in Korean, and teaching Korean as a foreign language. My current research project aims to investigate how the discourse construction of inter-Korean summits in the South Korean press has diachronically changed…

My current research is centered around reconstructing the spread and development of the alphabet, with special focus on the archaic Greek alphabets and their relationship with the neighboring Anatolian and Italic alphabets. I have a background in Indo-European linguistics, with a particular interest…

Nivja de Jong is Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. She holds a dual position at the Centre for Linguistics and the Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON). She supervises MA and PhD students on diverse topics in the field of L2 learning and…

Almost everywhere in the world where the post exists, the beadle is a ‘master of ceremonies’ who only makes his appearance on special occasions. In Leiden the beadle does much more. He is indispensable at dissertation defences and orations. He directs ceremonies and is a master at calming nerves.

Jill Jeffery is a university lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her research investigates academic writing development in secondary and postsecondary school settings by examining what “good writing” is and how it is taught and learned. Thus far, this work has led her to examine…

Olaf Kaper is a professor of Egyptology at Leiden University, specialized in the New Kingdom to Greek and Roman Periods. An expert in the fields of Egyptian religion, iconography and cultural history, he furthermore excavates in the Dakhleh Oasis.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is a Professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

Niels Schoubben is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot). As a linguist-cum-philologist, he studies the written remains of extinct Central Asian languages in order to uncover words and grammatical patterns borrowed from one ancient language…

From once controversial scientific works and historical bibles, to personal shopping lists and clothing bills. The 17th-century Bibliotheca Thysiana and the archive of the collector Johannes Thysius exhibit both the intellectual and everyday life as it was three hundred years ago. Now a brand-new digital…

Marion Elenbaas is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

Kate Bellamy is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Linguistics. Her research focuses on P’urhepecha, a language isolate spoken in Michoacán, Mexico. She is particularly interested in its lexical semantics and morphological composition, as well as how it is used – and varies – in language contact…

Language is omnipresent: when you talk, app or meet in Teams. Understanding how we communicate with one another and what communication does to us is essential. In her inaugural lecture, Nivja de Jong will call to redress the balance between the sciences and the humanities.

Marc Buijnsters is a Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Dutch artist and visionary David Humbert de Superville (1770-1849) was the founder and first director of the Print Room at Leiden University. An exhibition and symposium are now being organised in his honour. What makes him so remarkable?

Rik van Gijn is professor by special appointment of ethnolinguistic vitality and diversity in the world at the Centre for Linguistics. His interests focus on the indigenous languages of South America, and in particular on the question of the historical development of the stunning linguistic diversity…