Since the Middle Passage is in the North Atlantic, and the North Atlantic has a relationship with the arctic, what relationship does the Arctic have with the Middle Passage? How can this relationship be used to provide a space of healing by uncovering Afro/diasporic counter narratives?

This is the physics summer school of Leiden University. It is part of the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION). The summer school is intended for Bachelor (BSc) students in physics. It covers topics from quantum matter and optics, to biological & soft matter physics and cosmology and theoretical physics.…

At our Summer School on Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World we offer graduate students and researchers lectures by experts, practical classes, and hands-on experience with manuscripts from Leiden University’s famous collection of oriental manuscripts.

Discover the Summer Schools of Leiden University

Holidaymakers, day-trippers and tourists could book a university tour with a student as their guide in summer 2025.

Holidaymakers, day-trippers and tourists were able to book a University tour, with a student as their guide.

The annual Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) summer school offers outstanding bachelor students the opportunity to discover the research frontiers of modern physics. The programme includes seminars by renowned physicists on variety of topics, visits to research laboratories, and a range of social a…

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Why do black holes emit thermal radiation? And how does a closed quantum system thermalize?

Are you a researcher eager to share your work with a broader audience? Do you want to develop your science communication skills and learn how to engage effectively with society? Then join our Summer School in Science Communication in Leiden from 6-10 July 2026! Jointly organized by the Faculties…

Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World

Practical information about the physics summer school of Leiden University: the frontiers of modern physics. This page contains information about the cost and price of the summer school, the available scholarships, location, housing and the programme. This summer school is a part of the Leiden Insitute…

Optimally solving real-world expensive Black-Box Optimization (BBO) problems w.r.t. real-world constraints, such as wall-clock time and computational costs, is extremely difficult and tedious.

The Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2026 offers a varied program of introductory as well as more advanced courses in Anatolian, Classics, Descriptive Linguistics, Language Documentation, Eastern Christianity, Germanic, General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Indo-European, Indology,…

Discover the Summer School Frontiers of Children’s Rights by Leiden Law Academy, with this year's theme of accountability and access to justice. Read more here!

In this book Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later.

The Graduate School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in collaboration with the Department of Methodology and Statistics and researchers in the field of Methodology and/or Statistics of the other Institutes provides training courses for PhD candidates and other researchers.

Optimization tasks in practice have multifaceted challenges as they are often black box, subject to multiple equality and inequality constraints and expensive to evaluate.

The physical origin of the dozens of stellar-mass binaries, the mergers of which have been detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration via gravitational waves, is still unknown.

In White Lies and Black Markets, Fatah-Black offers a new account of the colonization of Suriname—one of the major European plantation colonies on the Guiana Coast—in the period between 1650-1800.

Scientists are asking your help to find the origin of hundreds of thousands of galaxies that have been discovered by the largest radio telescope ever built: LOFAR. Where do these mysterious objects, which extend for thousands of light-years, come from? A new citizen science project called LOFAR Radio…

Would you like to do something for the victims of the war in Ukraine? Several actions have been set up to help the people in Ukraine. Read below what you can do.

Continuous optimization is never easy: the exact solution is always a luxury demand and the theory of it is not always analytical and elegant.

This book is the first systematic analysis of the changes in the use of goods and services by households of Black South Africans since the early nineteenth century.

Workshops, lectures

What is dark matter? How do supermassive black holes form? ‘Primordial’ black holes might hold the answer to these long-standing questions. Leiden and Chinese cosmologists have identified a new way in which these hypothetical objects could be produced just after the Big Bang. Publication in Physical…

An international team of astronomers led by Matus Rybak (Leiden University) has proven, thanks to accidental double zoom, that millimetre radiation is generated close to the core of a supermassive black hole. Their findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Circinus galaxy is being fed with gas by two spiral arms. This is what PhD candidate Wout Goesaert discovered. But only a small percentage disappears into the black hole, the rest is ejected.

The aim of the project is to contribute to the process of archive formation ongoing in Post-Apartheid South Africa through the inclusion of photographs that have been either unacknowledged or excised from the national canon.

On 3 December the Europa Institute organised a debate about the figure of Black Pete. The central theme of the debate was the role which the law can play in deciding the future of Black Pete.

Physicists understand little about quantum matter, which is a building block of future quantum computers. Theorists have now discovered that black holes with ‘dreadlocks’ harbor a similarly exotic order pattern, which makes calculations on quantum matter easier. Publication in Physical Review Letter…

An international team of astronomers has published a map of the sky showing over 25,000 supermassive black holes. The map, to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is the most detailed celestial map in the field of so-called low radio frequencies. The astronomers, including Leiden astronomers,…

Promotor: H.J.A. Rottgering, Co-Promotor: R.J. van Weeren

Meet the newest Full Professor at the Leiden Observatory: Joe Hennawi. All the way from Santa Barbara, California, Hennawi will strengthen the astronomy institute. In Leiden, he will use his recent ERC Advanced Grant to study how supermassive black holes come into existence.

This summer the department of Labour Law at Leiden University will start a new tradition of an annual summer school addressing current issues in labour law from an international, transnational and European point of view. With a mixture of lectures, seminars and a field trip, topics will be explored…

'Every year the courses are different, and there are new things to learn.' The 6th Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics from 18-29 July this year has attracted 120 participants, 90 international and 30 from the Netherlands.

All kinds of reasons have been put forward for why plants apparently fail to make maximum use of the available light. None of these reasons can explain why after two billion years of evolution they are not black, like industrial photovoltaic solar cells. Are we missing something?

Older children more frequently link Black Pete with a black person. Both younger and older children think positively about him. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by Judi Mesman, Professor of Diversity in Parenting and Development.

Uncertainty and noise are frequently-encountered obstacles in real-world applications of numerical optimization. The practice of optimization that deals with uncertainties and noise is commonly referred to as robust optimization.

The increasing competition in the automotive industry requires the tailored, swift development of technologically sophisticated vehicles. Therefore, the computationally expensive state-of-the-art simulation technologies are combined with optimization algorithms. An example of a real-world optimization…

How is Indian foreign policy made? This special issue of the journal India Review, edited by political scientists Nicolas Blarel (Leiden University) and Avinash Paliwal (SOAS University of London) features a number of interesting case studies that bridge the gap between Foreign Policy Analysis and India’s…

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration receives the 2021 Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award. In April 2019, the EHT team presented the first-ever photograph of the shadow of a black hole. Leiden professor Huib-Jan van de Langevelde has been director of EHT since last year. Three…