Joëlle Koning has been appointed as Head of Student Affairs (OSZ) in the Faculty of Humanities from 1 July.

Liveable Planet, the Leiden interdisciplinary research programme on sustainability, has a full presence at the LUGO Sustainability Day on Tuesday 9 May. Professor Jan Willem Erisman will deliver the keynote lecture. You can also ask questions about sustainability research and interdisciplinary collaboration…

It is sufficiently plausible that the professor from the Faculty of Archaeology exhibited the ‘inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour’ detailed in the advice of the investigating committee. That is is unless the professor provides counter-evidence. This is the conclusion of the Subdistrict Court…

Organisation

With funding from the Work Experience Fund, the Work Balance in Action core group aims to ease teachers' workload.

Rafal Matuszewski has been unanimously elected to the Board of the Young Academy of Europe.

Assistant professor Ancient History Rafal Matuszewski has been honored with the prestigious 2026 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This distinguished award, accompanied by 60,000 € in funding, recognizes Matuszewski’s outstanding contributions to research…

From researching plastic pollution to caring for injured wildlife, volunteers play a crucial role in conservation. But much of the valuable knowledge they gather remains unused.

Alumna Tiziana Lippiello became the first female rector magnificus of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice last year. In this way, she hopes to contribute to emancipation in the academic world: 'We need more women here.'

For the academic year 2025-2026, nine (teams of) teachers will receive a Grassroots or Grass shoots grant. Here you can read about their projects.

As both old and new democracies experience increasing democratic backsliding, there is a critical societal need to rethink the design and effectiveness of democratic checks and balances. In this conference on Friday 9 June, the aim is to explore multidisciplinary insights about what makes the checks…

For the past year, Anne Wellink represented students' interests on the Faculty Board. As of September, Nova Verkerk will take over. In this interview, the two of them look back and ahead to the future.

On Thursday 1 February, the symposium ‘On interdisciplinary collaboration: How do we foster connections?’ will take place. The event will discuss lessons learned, but also look at the future. An essential event for every Leiden researcher who is involved in an interdisciplinary collaboration, or would…

Education, Research

Education, Research

As a teacher you are expected to provide and sign the results obtained by your students. Please follow the instructions below for smooth processing by the Science Student Administration:

At the request of the Executive Board, the Honours Academy is working on a revision of our honours education and the way it is organised. This article tells you what is going to change and who will be affected.

Sander van der Horst recently joined the Institute for History and the Royal Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV-KNAW). He is a PhD candidate in Cultural Histories & Decolonization in Southeast Asia. Below, he introduces himself.

On August 18, 2022, Henk Bodewitz, distinguished Indologist and emeritus professor of Sanskrit at Leiden University, passed away in his hometown of Utrecht.

Leiden University is a member of the Una Europa European alliance. This partnership of 11 research-intensive universities is working to shape the university of the future.

Thirteen Leiden University exchange projects have been awarded an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility grant. The total award of around 450,000 euros will enable 103 students and staff to go on an exchange.

Frans de Haas, professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and Director of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy, will join the management team of the MI on a temporary basis, in any event until 1 January 2022, in the role of Scientific Director-Change Manager.

Annetje Ottow is stepping down as President of Leiden University’s Executive Board on 1 September 2025 after almost five years in the role. She looks back at the highs and lows – and ahead to what’s next.

ChatGPT, the text-generating chatbot, has recently become available for anyone to use. Is this artificial intelligence (AI) tool a threat to our teaching?

Our university labs are bursting with cutting-edge research, but how do you commercialise these inventions and discoveries or translate them into outcomes that benefit society? Professor of biological chemistry Nathaniel Martin started a spin-off company with his team. ‘When it comes to valorisation…

The challenge: take three hundred students from vastly varying disciplines and teach them the basics of academic thinking in twelve lessons. Impossible? Professor Ben Arps and his team of tutors succeeded. It resulted in a large amount of positive student evaluations.

The bachelor’s programme in Dutch Studies marked its fortieth anniversary on 22 May with a festive gathering in Leiden.

If you have a class where you want students to collaborate, you can consider booking an Active Learning Classroom. These flexible educational spaces in Leiden and The Hague are designed to make lectures more interactive.

Prof. J. (Jos) Schaeken, Professor of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Cultural History, will be the interim Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1 March 2025. He will succeed the present Vice-Dean, Mirjam de Baar, who will complete her second term on that date.

Four lecturers from Leiden University will receive a 50,000-euro Comenius Teaching Fellow grant. This will enable them and their team to realise an educational innovation within their own teaching.

What effect do trends in the art world have on the formation of museum collections? University lecturer Martin Berger wants to answer that question in his research within the Museums, Collections and Society project, which asks ethical questions about the origin of collections.

Research

At a symposium on 26 May, experts, staff and students from Leiden University will discuss what should happen with Rein Dool’s painting in the Academy Building and what the guidelines for the University’s exhibition policy should be. These issues will be explored from diverse perspectives during the…

Interdisciplinarity is more than a buzzword in academia. It’s essential for tackling today’s biggest challenges. But what does it look like in practice? How can PhDs learn the skills needed to work across disciplines, and how can supervisors master the art of guiding them?

Eighty students from universities across Europe and Africa are coming together this week to explore the topic of sustainability at the Una Europa Student Congress at Campus The Hague. The event is just one example of the many opportunities the alliance offers our students and staff.

The new Japanese Ambassador, Michii Rokuichiro, visited Leiden University on 2 March.

Didactics

Our annual strategic conference was held this year on 15 and 16 June in Soesterberg, and has now become a tradition at our university.

It was not light, but its absence that caught Stephanie Noach's attention a few years ago. With her research on darkness in art, she aims to show how darkness can question and sometimes even undermine colonial imagery.

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.'

What can we learn from female colleagues who are the first to hold top positions within the university? On International Women’s Day, President of the Executive Board Annetje Ottow and Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl talked with a group of university staff from all levels within the organisation, and…

Historical geographer Marcel IJsselstijn developed a new approach that improves our understanding of how medieval cities were planned. He hopes it will help archaeologists, urban planners and designers address contemporary challenges.

Mirjam Twigt recently joined the Institute for History as a Research Officer ⁠/ Postdoctoral Researcher for the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Governance of Migration and Diversity (LDE GMD)⁠. Below she introduces herself.

In September 2025 Leiden University hosted a greatly successful academic conference "Care and the Jewish Experience" organized by the Leiden Jewish Studies Network. Among our guests and presenters were academics from many universities, many disciplines and at different stages of their academic caree…

Two MEPs visited Leiden University on Friday 30 January. Their visit underscored the vital importance of the university’s expertise on Africa, Asia and Latin America in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.

A course that concludes with a video pitch, instead of a paper or examination: Italian Language and Culture students each recorded their own knowledge clip, speaking to a wide audience about Italian cultural expressions. We asked Goran Bouaziz, Cameron-May Bosch and Katja Timmer what they thought of…

The airspace had almost closed last year as Leiden students and staff rushed to leave the Netherlands Institute Morocco (NIMAR). How is this Leiden institute in Rabat doing over a year later? ‘Luckily we’d done a crisis exercise a few months before. Everyone managed leave the country in time.’

Lecture, China Seminar