The Dutch universities as a whole are lobbying for a 'normal' academic year from the end of August, where on-campus teaching will be possible. It's a view that Leiden University shares. Rector Hester Bijl talks about what teaching will be like then. She also looks back on a year of lockdown.

I have always been fascinated by the cultural and linguistic interaction between Arabic speakers and Bantu speakers in Eastern Africa up to Southern Somalia as well as by the Islamic influences and their impact along the East African coast. These interests motivated my choice of studying Classical Arabic…

Nira Wickramasinghe is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Jaap van den Herik (1947) is professor of Computer Science and Law at the Faculty of Science (since 2014) and at the Faculty of Law (since 1988). His main task is to be Chair of the Board of Directors of the Leiden Centre of Data Science (LCDS).

René Kleijn holds an MSc in chemistry and a PhD in Industrial Ecology both from Leiden University. He is now an associate professor at Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University.

Alp Yenen is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He works primarily on the political history of modern Turkey and the Middle East. He is specialized on the turn of the 20th century, First World War, Interwar period, and the Cold War period. He also comments and…

Roos van Oosten is an assistant professor in Medieval and Urban Archaeology at Leiden University. She has a broad research interest reflected in numerous publications on diverse topics: sanitation management, the textile industry, cemeteries and burial practices, historical cooking, ceramics and environmental…

Mirjam de Bruijn is an anthropologist whose work has a clearly interdisciplinary character with a preference for contemporary history and cultural studies.

Dutch municipalities are racing to digitalise, introducing virtual services, fraud-detection algorithms and more. The digital city may not always serve its residents. Professor Jiska Engelbert calls for civil servants who dare to push back.

Educational innovation provides both opportunities and challenges for lecturers. How do you put your innovative ideas into practice or how do you choose the right learning resources for your teaching? From now on, lecturers can go for support and inspiration to the new Leiden Learning & Innovation Centre…

Getting young people excited about history is quite possible without books. Researchers from Leiden travelled to Morocco to work with schoolchildren on reconstructing cultural heritage in the popular video game Minecraft. The result: one virtual 14th-century city gate – and 20 teens with a greater appreciation…

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…

Starting February 6, the Leiden interdisciplinary research programme Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) will host a lunch seminar series on pressing global governance issues. The series will feature researchers from various disciplines. It promises to be a trove of inspiration and…

Public agencies are keen to use new technology such as AI to speed up their primary processes. But the internal organisation is often a major stumbling block. SAILS researcher Friso Selten conducts research at the interface between data science and public administration.

How do you co-create with researchers in other parts of the world? LDE wants to gather and share knowledge on the grand challenges and to do so across national borders. A delegation of 27 researchers will therefore travel to Indonesia at the end of October to take part in the LDE-BRIN Academy.