The Hague is the international city of peace and justice, home to many international organisations, embassies and multinational corporations but also a fun student city filled with music, cafes, museums and the most popular beach in the Netherlands!

This research paper was requested by the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. It was published by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague. Leiden University is one of the participating institutes in this publication and our researcher…

The master’s programme in Museum Studies at Leiden University is uniquely positioned at the intersection of Art History and Museum Studies. Informed by leading interdisciplinary research, this degree provides you with a strong academic foundation for a variety of careers in museums, galleries and heritage…

During the autumn semester (September-December), NIMAR offers a joint LDE (Leiden-Delft-Erasmus) minor Urban Studies in Morocco: Cities in Transformation (30 EC), an interdisciplinary programme focused on contemporary urban change in Morocco. The minor combines humanities, social sciences, design and…

This project investigates which metaphors are problematic in machine translation, when, why, and for whom.

Debate

From September 20 to 23, an international Summer School was hosted by the Museums, Collections & Society research programme. PhD candidate in Archaeology Nicky Schreuder attended the Summer School.

On Wednesday 4 September, Queen Máxima opened the renovated tropical greenhouse complex of the Leiden Hortus Botanicus, an event that attracted wide public interest. Thanks to this renovation, the greenhouses are even better equipped for scientific research.

This abrupt climate change of 8200 years ago (the so-called 8.2k calBP climate event) has received wide attention among natural scientists, also because of today's rapid climate changes and their impact on our own society. The archaeological implications, however, have not been investigated so far.…

Art historian Elizabeth den Hartog has been studying medieval sculpture at Leiden University for 32 years. Like a detective, she searches buildings, books and archives in the hunt for the cultural meaning of unique sculptures.

North Korea may seem like an isolated country but it has strong ties with African regimes. This alliance, which trades in arms despite international sanctions, is increasingly operating out of the liberal world order’s sight, PhD candidate Tycho van der Hoog warns.

Almost a century passed since the much-celebrated judgement in the case concerning the Factory of Chorzów was delivered. This 1928 judgement of the Permanent Court of International Justice affirmed the essential principle of ‘reparation’ in international law, claiming that ‘restitution’ is the preferred…

The project seeks to come to an understanding of the archaeology of the desert and the ways in which its inhabitants engaged with their constraint, marginal environments through time. It compares and interprets site distribution and community organisation over a long time scale and across several different…

How have human-environmental entanglements changed in the Gulf of San Miguel, Darien, Panama, from the first traces human practices through to the present?

The Wadi al Jizzi Archaeological Project is a systematic and long term archaeological surface survey project, investigating the rich archaeological heritage of the Wadi al Jizzi region (Oman) from the Paleolithic until the early Modern period.

In ancient times, the steppe in the hinterland of Petra (Jordan) was transformed into a green oasis. This project tries to shed insights in the agricultural, water management and societal processes resulting in this transformation. This will be accomplished by practicing an interdisciplinary research…

The project aims at contributing to the safeguarding of Palestinian cultural heritage and the enhancement of economic situation through tourism development, by presenting and managing one of the most important archaeological resources, the archaeological site of Tell Balata.

Update : March 2020 Director: Professor Dr Harco Willems (KU Leuven), co-director Dr Marleen De Meyer (KU Leuven & NVIC)

Crossing borders and connecting people in archaeological heritage management. Essays in honour of prof. Willem J.H. Willems

The Cryogenics Department has a liquid helium production unit and an automatic liquid nitrogen filling plant.

The Old Observatory has a rich history. On this page you will find a short version of the history that took place in the observatory.

Since the late 1990s Leiden University has been located in two cities: Leiden and The Hague. Leiden is where the University was founded and still forms its heart, with six of the seven faculties being housed there. The faculty of Governance and Global Affairs is located in The Hague and most of the…

In the master’s programme in Archaeology, you can follow courses on the archaeology of West Asia, deepening your understanding of this region’s fascinating past.

The Leiden Archaeology social media team presents its first documentary on one of our faculty's research projects. A team led by Bleda Düring, Victor Klinkenberg, and Maria Hadjigavriel explores the Cypriot Chalcolithic period in Palloures, Cyprus.

January 1st 2017, Bastiaan Steffens will be taking up the Graduate Teaching Assistance PhD position at the Archaeology and Ancient History department at Leicester University.

A Rubicon Grant is awarded to dr Quentin Bourgeois for his reserach project

This programme adopts a new approach based on the paradoxical nature of these responses in early modern Italy: it draws on rhetorical discussions of lifelikeness and living presence, and it uses the anthropological theory of art as agency developed by Alfred Gell.

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

Recently, Valentina Azzarà joined the Faculty of Archaeology as a postdoc in the Archaeology of the Near East research group. She mostly focuses on the archaeology of Eastern Arabia, especially Oman. “I literally fell in love with the place.”

For the cyber specialization within the master program Crisis and Security Management, the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) seeks to provide two online courses (SPOCs) to ensure that all students will be on the same page when it comes to prior knowledge of the technicalities of cyber…

The proposed investigation focuses on the Pre-Hispanic archaeological site Aguas Buenas recently documented by Dr. Alexander Geurds

The position includes leading the Artistic Research coaching team and the vision of artistic research throughout Bachelors and Masters programs.

Leiden physicist Anne Meeussen has been nominated for the title of New Scientist Science Talent. She will be up against 14 young scientists from other Dutch and Belgian universities. The polls are already open!

The essay focusses on ACPA PhD Guy Livingstons´ experiences of silence within the former US Embassy in The Hague, a unique (and bizarre) building from 1955 by the brutalist architect Marcel Breuer.

On Tuesday, December 9 2025, Prof. Koen Ottenheyn delivered the last Austria Centre lunch talk of 2025. Prof. Ottenheyn serves as a professor of architectural history at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Academic Curatorium which advises…

On Friday 11 October, the workshop on “The Stigma of ‘Underdevelopment’ in Heritage Production” took place in the beautiful building of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. The workshop was organized by Jasmijn Rana (CADS) and John Hanna (TU Delft)…

Quentin Bourgeois and Luc Amrkeutz were interviewed for an National Geographic Historia article about the burial mound research in the Veluwe.

This interview features Drs. Peter Bisschop (Leiden University) and Yuko Yokochi (Kyoto University) and their work on the monumental Skandapurāṇa project.

The project investigates the landscape organization of Corded Ware groups in north-western Europe during the 3rd Millennium BC.

The material and intellectual presence of Egypt is at the heart of Western culture, religion, and art from Antiquity to the present. In his book ‘Beyond Egyptomania. Objects, style and agency’, archaeologist Miguel John Versluys not only presents the Nachleben of Egypt as a major constituent of (European)…