On Friday 2 October journalist Sander van Hoorn starts his lecture series ‘The Middle East doesn't exist’, which was organised by the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). ‘If all goes well, people will understand the Middle East that bit less after my lectures.’

This PhD project investigates how literary translators and journalists react and respond to machine-translated metaphors and what the repercussions for professional practice are.

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

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On 21 September 2022 Arfiansyah successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The unique geographic and temporal breadth of research at Leiden allows us to stimulate a shift from the classical Weberian mode of scholarly production that views historical development and modernization as emanating from Europe and the West to a multi-polar perspective that allows for more nuanced,…

The authors delve into the varying degrees to which institutions across different nations connect foreign events to their respective country's domestic affairs.

This book is the first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States. It does extensive empirical analysis of open-source material and interviews in relation to three cases…

Chaider Bamualim defended his thesis on 9 September 2015

How do crises produce changes in specific European Union foreign policy areas, and how should we conceptualise these policy changes?

Traces of a Colourful Past

This film will be screened on Sunday, 19 April 2026 at 7:00 pm.

Brain scanners have radically changed neurolinguistics. They are increasing our understanding of how the brain processes language. Professor Niels Schiller has produced a standard work on this.

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

Conference

Majuka Tanabe defended her thesis on 17 June 2015

Knowledge of Islam and of Muslim societies is indispensable when trying to properly understand the globalising world, as well as changing Dutch society. Researchers from Leiden are therefore immersing themselves in the languages, culture and religion of Muslim societies. Their work and insights can…

Endangered languages can survive if they are taught properly to new speakers, such as people with a migrant background. This is what Professor by Special Appointment Felix Ameka will say in his inaugural lecture on 30 September. Dutch people can do their bit by being less ‘polite’ to people whose mother…

By analysing neglected (continental) spy centres and integrating these groups of female intelligencers into the traditional, male-orientated historical narratives, this project will proceed towards a gendered history of early modern espionage.

This dissertation examines whether a cochlear implant provides congenitally deaf born children with sufficient auditory input to acquire low salient and syntactically and semantically complex functional items such as personal pronouns compared to their hearing peers.

How is generative AI changing the way we learn, communicate, and make sense of the world today? As AI tools become part of everyday life, they don’t just produce text but shape meaning, influence trust, and impact how we find and share information. This project explores how people use, experience and…

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

War and terrorism overshadow interest in the pre-Islamic heritage of the Arabic peninsula. The new Leiden Centre for the Study of Ancient Arabia aims to make the general public more aware of the ancient history of this region.

Conference

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) are essential for modern healthcare delivery, yet their development faces significant challenges including heterogeneous data formats, regulatory compliance, and the growing demand for AI-driven decision support.

For nearly twenty years the Lorentz Center has been a unique venue where researchers from all over the world work in intense collaboration. In an inspiring academic climate, researchers are free to organise specialised workshops within and across disciplines, be it humanities, social sciences or sci…