Pascale Eskes is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Linguistics

It is one of the most talked-about subjects right now: how do we eradicate sexual harassment and violence? Alumnus Femke Eisma is the spokesperson for Mariëtte Hamer, the government commissioner tasked with tackling this persistent social problem. Eisma studied the Dutch language at Leiden. How is her…

Lecture, Sign Language & Deaf People

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 Choose a Language Day was created to make high school students enthusiastic about choosing a linguistic profile and further education. Third-years were able to learn about different language studies at the Faculty of Humanities.

PhD defence

For associate professor Jenneke van der Wal, things have been good recently. After being awarded a Vici and Una Europa grant, she has now also received an Ammodo Science Award. ‘It is a nice confirmation that I am doing valuable work.’

PhD ceremonies in the Academy Building will be much easier for family, friends and other non-specialist audience members to follow after the summer. The Doctorate Board is pleased to have decided that as of 1 September, all Leiden PhD candidates will begin their PhD defence with a lay talk. ‘It can…

Peter Bisschop is Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is a Sanskritist and cultural historian of ancient India, with particular interest in the development of Hinduism and related traditions. His research is philological in…

Fifteen hundred years ago, the north-west of what we now call China was a jumble of peoples. How did those Indians, Khotanese and Tocharians influence each other and each other's languages? Associate professor Michaël Peyrot has been awarded an ERC grant of almost two million euros to unravel this 'web…

Making use of social media is a good way to meet others or to hear about the latest news and developments. But it also has its downsides: disinformation, trolling, disrespectful comments and even the misuse of (personal) data.

Suzan Verberne has been appointed professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from 1 October. Verberne has been at LIACS since 2017 as group leader of the Text Mining and Retrieval group.

Conference, Workshop

Festival

PhD defence

Cornelis van Tilburg is an education and research assistant at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Henric Jansen is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Nicky Schreuder is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology.

From films, video games and historical novels to Nordic folk bands, Old English from the early Middle Ages is experiencing a revival in the 21st century. Together with international colleagues, university lecturer Thijs Porck (LUCAS) made a book about the 'resurrection' of this dead language.

Göran Sundholm is a Professor of Philosophy of Mathematics and of Logic at the Institute for Philosophy.

Marianne van Dijken is an assistant professor at the Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University.

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…

Carlotta Rigotti, Postdoc researcher at eLaw, and Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Associate Professor at eLaw, delivered a lecture on AI and non-discrimination, engaging students with the Debiaser demo.

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…

Lecture, Language and the Human Past

This year's London Hellenic Prize is awarded to Caroline Vout for her excellent study of representations of the human body in sculpture, Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body.

More focus on diversity in Antiquity, workshops for students with disabilities, and a card game to share stories about diversity: these and other projects will receive funding from the JEDI Fund in 2023.

Leiden scholars succeeded in making Arabic accessible to Western academic communities as early as the sixteenth century. But how did they approach this problem?

For people who are seriously ill, an empathetic doctor can make a world of difference. Psychologist Janine Westendorp examined helpful and harmful communication in the consulting room. ‘It’s very important to stress that you are always there supporting the person, even if there’s no cure.’

Workshop & exhibition

Professor Felix Ameka and university lecturer Maria del Carmen Parafita Couta have received an NWO Open Competition grant together with Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) to do research on ‘code-switching’: switching languages by multilinguals.

A collaboration between linguists, geographers and anthropologists aims to uncover how languages spread across South America over thousands of years. Associate Professor Rik van Gijn is responsible for the linguistic side of this NWO project.