Arie Verhagen said farewell as the chair of Dutch Linguistics and is appointed as the new chair of Language, Culture and Cognition.

Priya Swamy defended her thesis on 27 October 2016

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Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: Dr. V.S.F.T. Merckx

An archaeological/ethnohistorical study.

A study into the use of strategies in listening to French news reports

This volume examines how the history of the humanities might be written through the prism of scholarly personae, understood as time- and place-specific models of being a scholar.

These are our lecturers (in alphabetical order) for the 2025 Summer School in Languages and Linguistics.

From 2 to 5 September 2015, Leiden served as the stage for one of the world’s largest linguistics conferences: the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) 2015 Annual Meeting. Marianne Mithun, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and outgoing president of the SLE, is not surprised that…

Our bachelor’s degree programmes do not always align with the level of the master’s degree programmes. In order to tackle this, this team will examine how we can improve that alignment and how the graduation trajectory can play a role in this.

Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR) studies religion as human activity, in all its diversity.

When combined and used by specific people located in time and place, words can express something more than, different from, or even the opposite of their dictionary meanings.

Each year, the Leiden University Student Platform (LUS) presents the Leiden Education Prize.

The project focuses on communication processes regarding spirituality and existential issues in the medical health care in the Netherlands

What is the difference between a minister saying that something is possible or that it is not impossible ?

This dissertation is concerned with the development of grammar. Starting from a usage-based perspective, which holds that children use domain-general learning mechanisms to acquire the grammatical patterns of their mother tongue, Beekhuizen shows how to operationalize various concepts from this tradition…

A defining fixture of our contemporary world, video games offer a rich spectrum of engagements with the past.

The linguistic project constitutes the connection between the two other subprojects. It consists of two parts.

Watch and talk along with today’s science of the past during weekly Let’s Plays of popular games and vodcasts on the livestream platform Twitch.

Terms used by literary critics in characterizing the style of novels are often impressionistic (‘baroque’, ‘austere’, ‘vivid’, ‘cerebral’ etc.). Foundations for such evaluations are usually not provided. A scientific way of studying and explaining style is lacking in present day Dutch Studies. Suzanne…

Nicolaes Tulp (1593-1674) studied medicine in Leiden. He attended lectures in the Academy Building and was taught anatomy in the former Faliede Begijn church, now the ‘Old Library’ (Oude UB) building, for a long time the location of the anatomical theatre. Shortly after his move from Leiden to Amsterdam,…

Within the Comparative Religion Network staff and graduate students from LIAS-LUCSoR (and beyond) discuss ongoing work and cooperate on key issues in the comparative and systematic study of religion.

This study relates the vicissitudes of the Amerindian peoples who lived or still inhabit the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, from the earliest occupants, ca. 8000 BC, until at present.

Conferences, Workshops and Lectures showcasing research and tools in Digital Humanities.

This project incorporates spatiality into the discussion of medieval demography, allowing for a more nuanced view on medieval town populations. It establishes a maximum population count for towns for periods prior to 1400 and provides a means to compare the ranking of towns using size and density instead…

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

This project seeks to integrate scientific research and practical knowledge in the study of the mechanisms that make dialogue an effective tool for communication, teaching, and thinking.

The research involves the application and combination of archaeological and archaeometrical methodologies. Petrographic analysis and isotopic provenance studies of raw materials and exotics, and the study of the distribution patterns of these materials are used to gain insight into the exchange of goods…

A partnership with the Leiden Leadership Programme: what does it bring you? Two partner organisations in the field of sustainability, Arcadis and Bioto, share their experiences: “It's great to be surprised by new insights.”

Over 300 people from 38 different countries took part in the online lecture

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

The central research question focuses on identifying shifts in the urban social network in terms of private, semi-public and public space by means of mapping the spatial distributions of wells and cesspits in the town of Haarlem in the course of the pre-industrial period (1200-1800). Shifts may be indicative…

On Wednesday 4 September, Queen Máxima opened the renovated tropical greenhouse complex of the Leiden Hortus Botanicus, an event that attracted wide public interest. Thanks to this renovation, the greenhouses are even better equipped for scientific research.

The 2020-2021 academic year has begun. The new academic year may have been opened in a pared-down ceremony, but a ceremony it was nonetheless, with around 150 guests in the familiar setting of Pieterskerk and around 1,000 people watching the livestream. ‘Universities will always exist, however rapidly…

The second instalment of the Humanities Lab - the three-year honours programme of the Humanities – has reached its conclusion. On 12 May, 11 groups of honours student presented their work in the Arsenaal building.