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…

The Netherlands has a long history of mosquito-borne diseases, particularly malaria, until 1970 when it was declared malaria-free.

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

Promotors: Prof.dr. G.R. de Snoo, Prof.dr. H. Leirs (Univ. Antwerpen), Co-promotor: H.H. de Iongh

In this thesis we study the landscape of gravitational models which modify GR by introducing an additional scalar degree of freedom (d.o.f.) to source Cosmic Acceleration.

For this project we delve into children's digital media use during the transition from kindergarten to group 3 and investigate its impact on their social development.

A study of Dutch Fort at Galle, Sri Lanka

Who is funding African science? How are different African and international funders interacting and contributing to develop scientific research in the continent? Are there potential inadvertent synergies among research funders that can be identified? These and similar questions are at the heart of this…

The prevalence of obesity (BMI >40 kg/m2) has increased rapidly over the recent years, not only in adults, but also in children and adolescents.

The first professional training organised by the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development has finished. The participants work for municipalities, provinces, universities or are independent researchers or consultants in the Heritage Sector. During three intensive days in September…

CurveBend project aims to study the restauration of biodiversity in livestock landscapes through collective action, practical solutions, and research on ecological knowledge co-creation.

In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas.

Ancient peoples might have harnessed the power of fire to modify their environment

Promotor: J. Zaanen

How does the evolution of the archaeological landscape at Son Sard reveal rural settlement patterns on Mallorca, serving as a pars pro toto for Balearic rural archaeology?

The starting point of human-induced landscape changes has been under permanent debate. It is widely accepted that the emergence of agriculture strongly increased human impact on their environments. However, foragers can and do actively transform land cover and ecosystems. Ethnographic observations,…

Since 2013, the National Natural History Museum of the Netherlands, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, is unearthing the largest bonebed of the horned dinosaur Triceratops discovered so far. In order to answer questions about sedimentology, taphonomy and palaeobiology, palaeontologists and geologists collaborated…

The role of domestic and wild resource exploitation in Bronze Age subsistence

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

As part of the TerraNova project, a European research initiative on the study of landscape histories and futures, a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) was developed. Anastasia Nikulina was one of the main chapter coordinators who worked on this course, and she worked on the part about modelling in landscape…

A global synthesis of the extent, diversity and patterns in off-site fire use by historically documented and current hunter-gatherers with the remit of this study in the deeper past.

Mattias Brand defended his thesis on 10 April 2019

The project '‘The Temporality of Images: Merleau-Ponty’s Visual Ontology and its Resonances with Chinese Landscape Painting.’, in the most concise terms, explores ontological questions through the lens of images, drawing on phenomenology, iconology, art history, and comparative philosophy.

December 2020 saw the crowning publication of the Landscapes of Survival project by Professor Peter Akkermans. Its main topic is human habitation in marginal environments like the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. ‘The people living here built their own society, and they would not have viewed it as…

Computer scientists from Leiden University and the University of Münster describe a new theoretical starting point for approaching difficult optimization problems. They can take into account several criteria simultaneously, instead of just one at a time.

On December 16th 23 students of the Institute of Environmental Sciences of Leiden University took part of the first total species inventory to assess the effectiveness of an underwater landscape that was build in March 2003 to restore the biodiversity in an area where the environment was destroyed by…

The Ager Venusinus Project studies the relatively small number of recognized colonial dwellings dated securely to the period of colonization (i.e. the 3rd century BC). With a special interest in the Black Gloss ceramic typochronology

The Netherlands is losing plant species that rely on pollination by insects. Leiden environmental scientist Kaixuan Pan demonstrates this after analysing 87 years of measurements from over 365,000 plots. The news is alarming for our biodiversity and food security. ‘75 per cent of our crops and 90% of…

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the first United Nations World Conference on Women (Mexico City, 1975), a process that led to the creation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995). The Global Transformations and Governance Challenges Programme organised a roundtable to reflect on…

On the 26th of February, Joane de Lima Santiago successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Joane on this achievement.

HomininSpace is an agent based modelling and simulation system in which fluctuating carrying capacity is the key attractor for hominin dispersal. A parameterized and spatially explicit reconstructed palaeo-environment models available energy in the form of secondary biomass using reconstructed climate…

Han Meyer, Carola Hein, Paul van de Laar and Sabine Luning, argue that in the current moment of major crises these ship channels necessitate radical reconsideration.

PhD candidate Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart has received the Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds grant from the Leids Universiteits Fonds (LUF) to work on a research project focusing on the landscapes of the Second World War. ‘We will combine citizen science with deep learning to uncover traces of the c…

On Monday 6 May, GTGC guest researcher Joohyun Baik presented her research on 'Data Localization as a Data Sovereignty in Nigeria's Digital Policy Landscape'.

Farming practices, food production, and the agricultural potential of the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE) Argive Plain, Greece

Leiden University's International Honours College, Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) experienced empty halls and empty classrooms this past year on the residential campus on the Anna van Buerenplein in The Hague due to the global pandemic. Dr Paul Hudson designed a Covid-proof course that enabled…

Ethiopian wolves are endangered diurnal Afroalpine rodent hunters. I investigated the interaction between wolves, rodents and human land use in Borena Sayint National Park (BSNP), Abune Yosef and Aboi Gara in Ethiopia.

PhD defence

In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Northern-Netherlandish artists drew outdoors to train their hands and eyes, and to record landscapes and nature. In her inaugural lecture on 21 March 2022, Yvonne Bleyerveld, Professor by Special Appointment of Art on Paper and Parchment, draws our attention to a…