How should we address our colonial heritage? And how digital and accessible are our collections? Outgoing State Secretary Fleur Gräper spoke with researchers and heritage specialists about this on 25 January.

Jacqueline Hylkema is Assistant Professor of Cultural History at Leiden University College and Senior Scaliger Fellow at Leiden University Libraries’ Scaliger Institute. Her research focuses on forgery in early modern print culture, particularly in the Dutch Republic and Britain. Hylkema is currently…

Judith Naeff is Assistant Professor Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden University with a main interest in contemporary Arabic visual culture and literature. She has worked mainly on cities & urban imaginaries and memory & temporality.

Keiko Yoshioka is a Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies and Head of the Japanese language programme. She specialises in Japanese language and second language acquisition, with a focus on Japanese language pedagogy, multimodal interaction—especially gestures—Japanese ideophones,…

Research, Security

A team of Leiden researchers has won the Ammodo Science Award for innovative humanities research on perceptions of cultural heritage.

Ornately decorated head pieces and jewellery, images of imposing mosques and photos of local people. The 'Splendours of the Silk Roads' exhibition depicts life and different cultures along this important trade route.

Henk te Velde is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Professor of Dutch History. As professor he focuses on Dutch (and Western European) History from the late 18th century to the present, in particular political history and its spillover into contemporary politics. His books cover the history of liberalism…

Lisa Cheng is Professor of General Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her research interests centre upon comparative syntax, and the interactions between syntax and semantics, syntax and prosody, as well as syntax and processing. She is a co-founder of the Leiden Institute…

Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. A study by archaeologists at Leiden University on the use of fire shows that 400,000 years ago knowledge and skills must already have been exchanged…

Dr. Gerlov van Engelenhoven is an assistant professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), teaching courses on postcolonial memory, law & culture, and cultural interaction. His most recent book is titled Postcolonial Memory in the Netherlands: Meaningful Voices, Meaningful Silences.…

Céline Zaepffel is a Lecturer in French literature and culture. Her research focuses on the transmission of ideologies through modern children's literature and culture, based on an intermedial and sociological analysis of children's media and the historical and cultural context of their publication.…

Thijs Witty is an assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Sara Petrollino is a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She is an anthropological linguist specialised in languages and cultures of East Africa. She studies the relationship between language, culture and cognition, so how do the languages we speak…

Walter Gam Nkwi is Assistant Professor at the Institute for History.

Egbert Fortuin is Professor Russian Language and Linguistics.

Douglas L. Berger is, since 2017, Professor of Global and Comparative Philosophy and the Director of the Centre for Intercultural Philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Ivo Smits is a professor of Arts and Cultures of Japan at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).

As a sociolinguist, I am interested in how people use language in daily situations to achieve a variety of goals. As people do this, two things become immediately obvious. First, people routinely mean more than their words mean, so we always need to read between the lines of each other's (spoken or…

Tessa Verhoef is Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). She leads the Emergent Communication Group and co-founded the Creative Intelligence Lab (CIL). Her research is highly interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of language, cognition, cultural evolution…

Casper Wits is a University Lecturer in the Institute for Area Studies. His research focuses on postwar diplomatic and international history in East Asia, with a special interest in the development of Chinese and Japanse foreign policy and Sino-Japanese relations in this period. He also takes an interest…