A safe place to discuss burning social issues such as racism with each other. The student workspace Space to Talk About Race and the Afro Student Association both meet this need and also organise many other activities. Three board members explain why this is necessary.

Grootschalige productie van batterijen voor elektrische auto’s zwakt de emissiereductie die door elektrisch rijden wordt behaald af.

An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore. Archaeologist Alex Brandsen has now used deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to develop a search engine…

The LUCAS Impact Committee, consisting of Jan van Dijkhuizen, Rick Honings, Casper de Jonge, Angus Mol, Thijs Porck and Aafje de Roest, has offered this year’s LUCAS Public Engagement Award to Dorine Schellens and Peter Verstraten.

Histories Connected: Seminar

Ariadne Schmidt is professor by special appointment of the History of urban culture, in particular of Leiden (the Magdalena Moons Chair, funded by the Magdalena Moons Chair Foundation) and associate professor Economic and Social History. She is also Chair of Education of the bachelor, master and research…

On a sunny Lammermarkt, thousands of new students gathered to kick off their student life in Leiden at the 56th edition of EL CID.

From once controversial scientific works and historical bibles, to personal shopping lists and clothing bills. The 17th-century Bibliotheca Thysiana and the archive of the collector Johannes Thysius exhibit both the intellectual and everyday life as it was three hundred years ago. Now a brand-new digital…

Professor Joanita Vroom, together with the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) offered the course Byzantine Rome in September 2023. The course, co-taught by Vroom, Letty ten Harkel and various guest lecturers, investigated the transition of the city of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,…

Life cycle assessment (LCA) reveals the total environmental impact of products or production processes, and EU rules are going to make this even more important.

Professor Ariadne Schmidt and Associate Professor Arie van Steensel (University of Groningen) have produced A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Leiden, the first English-language history of Leiden. Mayor Peter Heijkoop received the first copy.

The sixteenth Annual Convention of Austria Centers took place in Budapest, Hungary in June 2024. There, colleagues gathered from around the world, coming from Jerusalem, Olomouc, Vienna, Berkeley, Edmonton, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Budapest and, of course, Leiden.

In 2019, Federico Cappadona was one of the first students to enroll in the new master’s specialisation Applied Archaeology. He recently graduated and he is happy to share his experience.

Are you looking for some listening material for the upcoming long weekend? Staff members and alumni of the Faculty of Humanities have been creating various podcasts over the last few months. A selection is shown here:

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic Empire expanded at a tremendous pace. Within a hundred years, it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian subcontinent. How did such a rapidly conquered territory become one empire? Professor Petra Sijpesteijn has been awarded a Vici grant…

Research master's student in history Jesse Dijkshoorn collaborated on a transcription system for medieval texts. ‘It’s nice to make the Middle Ages accessible to people.’

PhD defence

From chilling on the beach to a speech by the mayor. HOPweek is a speedy way for hundreds of ‘Leiden’ students who are going to be studying in The Hague to get to know each other. Many of them come from abroad. ‘I actually dare to cycle here.’

On January 17th 2023, Caterina Ghini, Ambassador of Greece to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, visited the Faculty of Archaeology. Her Excellency reached out to Leiden University with the purpose to collaborate and engage with us.

Taking a Bachelor’s in Security Studies while starting and running two businesses: student Mohamed Sulaiman never stops. But he wouldn’t have it any other way. PLNT The Hague entrepreneurs’ hub is a source of help and inspiration.

Jeroen van Gessel’s lecturers didn’t always have time for extensive feedback on his written assignments. So, together with tech-savvy friend Menno Hahury, he founded Eduface, a startup to develop an AI teaching assistant. ‘The first users now work three times faster.'

Not all sustainable business models have the impact they claim, Leiden researcher Levon Amatuni revealed. Car sharing and phone reuse, for example, have a smaller positive effect than previously thought. Amatuni advises people to ‘pay attention to actual changes in their consumption behaviour rather…

Course

I am interested in the decoloniality of Islamic studies, particularly in thinking through epistemic diversity in the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe. To that end, I am currently taking the Islamic idea of beauty (jamal) as starting point to reconceptualize Muslim subjectivity, studying how Muslims…

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen is Associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

Persian stories with beautiful miniatures, letters on papyrus from Egyptian traders and medicinal manuscripts translated from Greek and edited in Arabic. Studium Generale organizes a lecture series on the world-famous manuscripts from the Middle East collection of Leiden University Libraries (UBL).…

The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (AIBL), one of the five academies that make up the Institut de France, has elected professor Petra Sijpesteijn as foreign corresponding member (correspondant étranger), to fill the seat of the renowned Egyptologist Edda Bresciani.

Anthony Brown has a Master of Science degree in Astronomy from the University of Leiden and obtained his PhD there as well. He held positions as PostDoc at the Leiden Observatory, Instituto de Astronomía in Ensenada and at the European Southern Observatory. Currently he is working at the Leiden Observatory…

Sjoerd van der Burg is full professor in the Immunotherapy of solid tumors with emphasis on immunomonitoring. He heads the laboratory of Medical Oncology and leads the group of Experimental Cancer Immunology and Therapy. He is also appointed as senior investigator at the Oncode Institute. In addition,…

Roxanne Kieltyka focuses her research on the design, synthesis and use of supramolecular biomaterials. Her goal is to synthetically replicate cell-specific microenvironments within them to instruct cellular behaviour in development and disease.

Ed J. Kuijper is currently the head of the Experimental Microbiology and the Reference Laboratory for Clostridium difficile at the Leiden University Medical Centre and the Centre for Infectious Disease Control of the National Institute of Public Health. Since 2015, his department also hosts the 'National…

Matthias van Osch is professor in Radiology, experimental cerebrovascular imaging and he is vice-director of the C.J. Gorter Center for high field MRI. in 2016 he was awarded with the innovational research incentives scheme VICI “Breaking through spatial, temporal and physiological boundaries in brain…

In June 2015 I started working in the LUMC as professor of neuro-oncology, in particular quality of life. I work two days a week in the LUMC, where I am a staff member at the department of neurology. In addition to neuro-oncological patient care, I chair the neuro-oncology tumor working group and lead…

Olaf Dekkers is professor internal medicine, chair of the scientific board internal medicine at LUMC and visiting professor at the department clinical epidemiology in Aarhus, Denmark.

Ingrid Meulenbelt is professor of molecular biology of Osteoarthritis (OA) and head of the OA research group within the section Molecular Epidemiology and the department of Biomedical Data Sciences. She is vice-chair of the LUMC VENI committee and member of the executive body of education of the master…