We’ve been using BAS InSite, the university’s new basic administration system, for a month now. The transition to a single integrated platform for all HR, financial and administrative tasks went smoothly, for the most part, but also created a few challenges. ‘It’s not just a technical change; it also…

Leiden University is proud of its research and teaching, its staff and its students. This is why we are keen to inform society of what goes on at the University.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the optimisation of website content and other technical aspects to ensure that a site ranks higher in the results of search engines such as Google. As a web editor, you do not have much influence on the technology, but there are points that you can consider when writing…

Northern Yemen; a highland region often in the news as the center of the Houthi regime, has a political, social, and intellectual history spanning more than a millennium. This exhibition showcases some of the findings of the Early Modern State Development in Yemen project, based at Leiden University,…

Celebrate Leiden University’s 450th anniversary with the special International Staff Week Connecting New Opportunities, taking place from 3 to 5 September. Join academics and professionals to explore transformative developments and challenges of the 21st century in international higher education.

Research

Why and how do people collect things? Why does a museum display one object and not another? These questions are at the heart of the interdisciplinary research programme Museums, Collections and Society. The programme is holding a conference for scholars and the general public on 5 and 6 July.

In a topping out ceremony on Thursday 30 January, the new sports centre celebrated reaching its highest point and looked ahead to the future. The university will have a spacious and sustainable sports building by the start of 2026.

At the Dies Natalis Willem Otterspeer, Professor Emeritus of University History, presented the fourth and final volume of Groepsportret met Dame, his series on the history of Leiden University. De 'Strategie van de Aanpassing' covers the period 1876-1975. Otterspeer talked about his book in a podcast…

Six researchers from Leiden University have been awarded NWO Open Competition funding.

Young Leiden researchers Alisa van de Haar and Marleen Kunneman have received a KNAW Early Career Award. The prize, awarded annually for outstanding achievements, consists of 15,000 euros and a unique work of art.

Leiden University researchers will be working more closely with colleagues at Una Europa partner universities this year. Three research projects have been awarded up to €40,000 in Una Europa seed funding to explore questions related to democracy and AI, web tracking technologies and clean energy.

Organisation

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…

Seven researchers from Leiden University have made a successful application to the Open Competition SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) XS, a Dutch Research Council pilot programme.

Spui Campus, Leiden University’s fourth location in The Hague, will soon open its doors. The former V&D department store’s transformation into a university campus is becoming more visible by the week. Removal vans will soon be driving back and forth to move all the furniture there in time. The first…

The French political theorist Hélène Landemore has been appointed as the new Cleveringa Professor. She will deliver her inaugural lecture on 26 November.

Una Europa, an alliance of 11 top European universities, provides annual seed funding for new research and teaching projects. Assistant Professor Carmen van den Bergh applied for funding with her Flemish and Italian counterparts. Thanks to this funding and the support of Erasmus+, students can now take…

BrainTrain: an initiative from Leiden University in which a team of students visit high schools to make adolescents more resilient against disinformation on the news and on their socials. In an interactive two-hour guest lesson, high school pupils discover how easily their brains can be tricked into…

The leads for our new interfaculty themes recently met for the first time. We asked three of them what opportunities their theme presents to society, the university and individual staff?

Katharina Natter of the Institute of Political Science has been awarded the 2025 IMR Book Review Award for her book on migration politics in Morocco and Tunisia.

Research on quantum computers and Islamic charities: two Leiden researchers have received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council.

The university is home to many pearls of research institutes that do not make the news every day. The Executive Board visited one such pearl, the Institute of Philosophy, on Tuesday 1 July. It resulted in an inspired conversation.

Erik de Maaker wrote a monograph on how Garo, an indigenous community of the extended eastern Himalayas, experience and negotiate such disparities. The book shows how relatedness is reinterpreted as religious practices change, and communally held land ends up being privately controlled. Erik de Maaker…

Professor of Modern China Florian Schneider researches what people do with technology and what technology does with people. Social media, for example. And then mainly in China.

The university campus at Leiden Bio Science Park will change rapidly over the next few years. A short film shows the transformation to a full campus. See what this mix of new university buildings, student accommodation and restaurants and cafés will look like. And sustainability and biodiversity won’t…

On 11 July 2024, a gathering was held to celebrate the start of the construction of the new University Sports Centre (USC). Rugby players and a pole dancer from USC Leiden played a role in the celebration. A video was also shown, giving a whistle-stop tour of the new building.

Organisation

Leiden psychologists receive an Outreach Grant from the Young Academy Leiden (YAL) to talk about facts and fables in their field of research. Marieke Bos, Lara Wierenga, Marit Ruitenberg and Sanne Willems will receive up to €1000 to realise their project.

The Leiden interdisciplinary research programme Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) and the Embassy of Ireland are jointly organising a special book launch in The Hague. On 13 November, Gerry Finnegan, author and a former director of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), will…

Do you want your research to fit the rubric of heritage? Is heritage a relevant concept here? These were some of the questions that came up in the lively discussion following twelve five-minute pitches given by Leiden researchers at the ‘Academic Open Mic’ workshop in the Lipsius building on Thursday…

As the end of the year approaches, the new University Sports Centre (USC) building is nearing completion. Vice-President of the Executive Board Timo Kos visited the USC, which celebrates its 55th anniversary this year, to see how work is progressing.

On the occasion of the Workshop organized last July to officially launch the Leiden Chinese Queer Collection (LCQC), the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL) donated 30 titles of Taiwanese LGBTQ+ literature to support this initiative. These works where published between 1971 and 2022 by authors…

NATO not only safeguards our security and stability, but also defends Enlightenment principles, promoting prosperity, health and freedom. This is what eminent psychologist and thinker Steven Pinker argued to a packed Great Auditorium.

The Netherlands returned 478 artefacts to Indonesia and Sri Lanka this week, on the advice of a Dutch committee. Rightly so, says Leiden professor Pieter ter Keurs from the Museums, Collections and Society interdisciplinary research programme. ‘But do make it clear why you are returning something.’

Last week, the 'Leiden Anthropology of Asia Network' was created, based on the network event 'Leiden Anthropology of and in Asia' on 8 December 2021. During this event, it became clear that next to events oriented towards peer-level academic interaction, there is an urgent need for a better institutional…