PhD candidate Sulakhana de Mel discusses the link between geography, trade and food in Sri Lankan newspaper The Examiner.

Three Humanities lecturers received the Senior Teaching Qualification (SKO) this year. Lecturer Hossam Ahmed is one of them. What does he think makes for good education?

Master’s student Anna van Ark has landed her dream internship at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. For three months, she’ll be shadowing the curator and conducting research on Japanese prints for the acquisitions team.

LUCL member prof. dr. Holger Gzella has been elected as member of the Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe).

Several Spanish media paid attention to associate professor Eric Storm’s new book Nationalism.

Who was professionally involved in language between 1550 and 1650? And what were the financial returns of this language sector? Assistant Professor Alisa van de Haar has received an ERC Starting Grant to map out the situation in Northwest Europe between 1550 and 1650.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

With the help of the JEDI fund, Fatima al Moufridji and Thijs Porck went in search of cultural contacts between early medieval England, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Together they made four knowledge clips that can now be seen on YouTube.

What is writing? And what looks like writing, but isn’t? The Pseudo or Don’t pop-up exhibition explores the boundaries of scripts. The exhibition will run at Oude UB from 9 to 26 October.

Five thousand years before the common era (BCE), Proto-Indo-European, the mother of many languages that are spoken today in Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, originated in eastern Europe. PhD candidate Axel Palmér has combined a 175-year-old hypothesis with new techniques to demonstrate how descendants…

Lecture, Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series

When Petra Sijpesteijn became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, she was the only Dutch member with an appointment at a Dutch university. Two years later, she is also the only Dutch member of the Austrian Academy and officially joined the British Academy on 7 October.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25

PhD defence

Just as some people today dislike English influences on the Dutch language, in early modern times people also criticised the Frenchification of Dutch. But to what extent did French actually leave its mark in our language? PhD student Brenda Assendelft made a surprising discovery. PhD defence 24 May.

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.

Stephan Raaijmakers has been Professor of Communicative AI since 1 May. Prior to this, he had held this position for five years as professor by special appointment. How has his approach to AI changed in that time?

The perception of the Middle East is riddled with stereotypes that have had dire consequences on its people. What is myth and what is reality? How did these stereotypes come about? What consequences have they had? All of these questions and more are answered within this reading list.

PhD defence

She develops algorithms that outperform leading optimization techniques and can be applied in many fields. For this work, Niki van Stein and her team have won the GECCO Humies Award. ‘With our method, we can create and refine algorithms for a wide range of applications—algorithms that are better than…

Maarten Jansen, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Archaeology, was appointed as Distinguished Emeritus Professor for two years at the University of Bonn. In this position, Jansen, a world-renowned specialist on ancient Mexican pictorial manuscripts, will further expand upon the long-standing collaboration…

In the very first Korean class that teacher Eun-ju Kim taught, there were already students with dyslexia. With a background in special education and clinical developmental psychology, she developed a new method to help them, partly based on teaching methods from Dutch first language education.

The Netherlands Institute in Morocco is open to students from all Dutch universities. Two students explain why they are spending a semester studying in Rabat.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25

Workshop | TEAL series

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

Roman philosopher and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is still used as an intellectual example by politicians and speech writers today. But, he did not go unchallenged in his own day, as a statesman in particular. Classicist Leanne Jansen conducted research into how classical historians judged Cicero’s…

Film screening and Book Launch

Making justice accessible to all residents in Libya. This week, a new website is launched which should contribute to this. Leiden University and the University of Benghazi have been working together on several projects since 2012. Project leader Suliman Ibrahim explains why this project is unique.

For over six centuries, the Tatars have been part of Poland’s social and cultural fabric. In this 8-episode series, released weekly, professor Maurits Berger and assistant professor Ewa Górska explore how this Muslim minority has maintained its identity across generations, how Islam is practiced in…