Research by Assistant Professor Willemijn Waal has gained attention from various media outlets. Waal investigates, among other things, whether the Greek alphabet might be older than previously thought.

Leiden University is awarding an honorary doctorate to virologist Marc van Ranst. Van Ranst has been one of the main advisers of the Belgian government during the Covid pandemic. German Arabist Beatrice Gründler will also receive an honorary doctorate for her work in the field of Oriental Manuscript…

'Consider languages in their shared context.' That is the message of Professor and Arabist Beatrice Gründler, who will receive an honorary doctorate from Leiden University on 8 February. ‘I would like people to learn that Arabic history has a close connection with Europe.’

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…

My current research is centered around reconstructing the spread and development of the alphabet, with special focus on the archaic Greek alphabets and their relationship with the neighboring Anatolian and Italic alphabets. I have a background in Indo-European linguistics, with a particular interest…

Prof.dr. Maurits S. Berger, LLM (1964) is a lawyer and Arabist. He is professor of Islam and the West and holds the Sultan of Oman Chair for Oriental Studies at Leiden University, and is a senior research associate with the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague. He has worked…

Lecture | Leiden Lectures on Arabic Language & Culture

Edmund Flett, alumnus of the International Relations master's programme, has won the 2023 J.C. Baak Prize for his thesis ‘Settlements now, settlement later. Land swaps, settler relocation, and the viability of the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine’.

Lecture, Digital Archaeology Group

University lecturer Tazuko van Berkel is one of this year's laureates of the Ammodo Science Award. The award includes a sum of 350,000 euros that she can use as she wishes to explore new avenues in basic scientific research.

Miriam Müller is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies and director of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO).

Mr. Theo Krispijn is retired and doesn't have a desk at the university anymore. Please send him an email if you want to contact him. The mentioned telephone number is the number of the secretariat. Occasionally he gives courses on the Elamite language and ancient Near Eastern Music for interested…

Julia Krul is University Lecturer in ancient Sumerian at Leiden University. She obtained her PhD in 2014 from the WWU Münster. As a researcher she specialises in the religion, cultic and magic rituals, scholarship, literature, and cultural history of ancient Mesopotamia. She has published several articles…

Daniel Soliman is a curator of the Egyptian and Nubian collection of the National Museum of Antiquities and guest lecturer in Egyptology.

Master's students Eden Dijkstra and Rosemary Snelth are the first winners of the H.S. Versnel Prize for best master's or research master's thesis in the field of ancient religion. According to the jury, their theses were so original, well-written and of such high quality that both deserved first pla…

Middle East Studies Lecture

The National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden features a small photo exhibition on Mark Driessen's fieldwork research project in Southern Jordan. In this small exhibition you will see a selection of nine photos, made in Udhruh. This ancient Jordanian settlement lies fifteen kilometres east of Petra,…

In a recent article published on PLOS, Drs. Briana Pobiner and Ryan McRae of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History discuss the top 13 discoveries in human evolution in 2023.

This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Hugh Kennedy from SOAS University of London to Leiden. He is the fourth Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University.

How should the Quran be read? The manuscript of this holy book makes different interpretations possible. Researcher Marijn van Putten has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of two million euros to explore centuries-old recitations.

Niels Schoubben is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” (PI: Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot). As a linguist-cum-philologist, he studies the written remains of extinct Central Asian languages in order to uncover words and grammatical patterns borrowed from one ancient language…

Archaeologist Tuna Kalayci investigates roads in a recent edited book. What happens if we think of roads not only as containers of action but also as dynamic and complex phenomena, as the action itself? This question inspired Dr Tuna Kalayci to bring together various studies across a wide range of epochs…

Lecture, VVIK lecture

On 1 May, Casper de Jonge will be appointed Professor of Greek Language and Literature. ‘Greek literature did not come from Athens alone: authors from Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor also wrote in Greek.’

Middle East Studies Lecture

Master's student Vicente Fischer de Miranda Rodrigues is the winner of the KHMW Brewer Thesis Prize for History. He was awarded the prize for his research on donatism.

Arts and culture

Margaretha Folmer is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

Middle East Studies Lecture

Ineke Sluiter is Distinguished Leiden Professor of Greek at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society). Her research focuses on ancient ideas on language, public debates, and the use of value discourse, and connections between classics and the modern world. She leads the Gravitation Grant…

Lecture, Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series

Conference, Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values XIII

PhD candidate Jonathan Ouellet is a guest on the latest episode of the Wetenschappelijke Wezens podcast. As a researcher specializing in the numismatics of the Middle East, Central Asia, and China, Jonathan discusses currency and trade networks during the Early Islamic Period of said area. Hence, listen…

Middle East Studies Lecture

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Thousands of students and researchers from eight partner universities in the Netherlands and Flanders have been able to gain valuable experience in Egypt through the institute. Good reason for a celebrat…

Yi Chen is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Philosophy.