Last week, the sad news reached us that Dr Jan Schmidt passed away on 11 August 2025. We wish his partner, friends and family strength and comfort as they cope with this loss. Jan Schmidt will be remembered as one of the most prolific and learned scholars in the field of Ottoman codicology and histo…

Lecture, Sign Languages & Deaf People

Translating poetry is notoriously difficult. Translating poetry in such a way that the humorous nature of a poem remains intact is even more difficult, even though it is precisely jokes that can encourage children to read more, notes PhD candidate Alice Morta.

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

Professor Claartje Levelt, together with Paula Fikkert (Radboud University), has received an NWO Open Competition grant for research into the development of word production in toddlers.

The number of books by U.S. authors released in China has drastically decreased in recent years. Assistant professor Svetlana Kharchenkova wrote an article about this for the Diplomat.

Professor emeritus Frank Pieke speaks on BBC and BBC Vietnamese about Xi Jinpings ongoing fight against corruption within the Communist Party.

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

Lecture

The working language at Leiden University is Dutch. As not all employees at the University have the same level of Dutch language skills, there are various ways of working together.

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?

Nadine Akkerman, associate professor of early modern English literature is receiving the Dr Hendrik Muller Prize 2021 for her work.

Cornald Maas was able to ‘pioneer’ in Leiden. This Dutch Studies graduate, presenter, programme maker and publicist combined an active student life with studying hard.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our esteemed colleague Laura van Hoof on Wednesday 1 October, after an illness of more than a year. An alumnus of Leiden University, she worked in the Student Affairs department of the Faculty of Humanities, as the education coordinator for the…

The Executive Board has appointed Ineke Sluiter and Arnold Tukker as distinguished professors at Leiden University.

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

Leiden University has a style guide to ensure consistency across all of its publications. It also has a Terminology List with the preferred translations of terms used within Leiden University and the academic world.

PhD defence

Full lecture halls, a crowded information fair and a queue for coffee in the basement: during the Open Day, the Faculty of Humanities was inundated with curious prospective students.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

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

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25

When hobby divers revisited a nearly 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Texel, they discovered more than 1,000 objects in wooden boxes. Eight years later, postdoc Janet Dickinson used recovered books to compile a profile of the mysterious owner.

PhD defence

Lecture

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.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25

What do you do if you have a book from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but you suspect that the binding contains a fragment of a medieval manuscript? University lecturer Thijs Porck has received an NWO grant to experiment with a camera attached to a tube. 'The project boils down to keyhole surgeries…

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…

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…

Mirjam Oomens was working on her PhD research on language in the consulting room when she was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. Four years later, she has made it her mission to encourage doctors and other healthcare professionals to make fewer statements about life expectancy. 'Such a conviction can…

In September, the Una Europa ELSEA project, Enhancing Scholarship in Eastern Africa, officially started. Now that the project has been running for a couple of months, it’s high time to check in and see how the project is going.

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.

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.

The ISSC's ICT helpdesk receives dozens of questions from staff and students every day. A collaboration between TNO, LUCL and the ISSC aims to determine whether a specially designed chatbot could provide support in this area.

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

Master's students Adam El Amraoui, Eesha Sheel, Frieda Chen and Lawrence Kurowski are organising a graduate conference. On March 26, students will gather to ponder definitions of belonging both within Asia and among Asian diasporic communities.

Tests and assessments give you a better idea of how well students are doing. Keep reading to find out which ICT resources are available for the various assessment methods.

Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are changing many aspects of education. On this page we help you discover the possibilities, encourage responsible use and effectively deploy AI tools in your educational practice.

Course

Fancy listening to a podcast over the long Whitsun weekend? Over the past few months, some excellent work has once again been produced at the faculty.

Claartje Levelt is professor of First Language Acquisition. She researches how babies and toddlers learn their mother tongue. Besides her work, she enjoys being involved with music.