Lecture, LAC Asia Academy

In a packed Stadsgehoorzaal, philosopher and Member of the Senate Daan Roovers delivered the 54th Huizinga Lecture. It was a passionate plea for a form of politics thatt is not only about winning, but also about talking and playing.

Lecture, Book Launch

With the exodus of departing parliamentarians, which seems to have gained momentum this summer, the loss of experience in parliament after the upcoming general election in the Netherlands will be considerable. A cause for concern according to Wim van De Camp, former CDA MP, and Wim Voermans, Professor…

Full lecture halls, a crowded information fair and a queue for coffee in the basement: during the Open Day, the Faculty of Humanities was inundated with curious prospective students.

The Leiden Research Profile Area Political Legitimacy organizes a public symposium on the 12th of May 2016 on the legitimacy and future of the Dutch Senate.

‘Realising we have shared ancestors and that our past is dynamic makes us more accepting of others.’ Sada Mire is an archaeologist at Leiden University and a former refugee – she fled from the civil war in Somalia. At the HagueTalks night during the Just Peace Festival, she will share her thoughts on…

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

That's just learning parrot-fashion. This was the argument with which the proposal to establish a language lab at Leiden University was rejected in 1962. But six years later, the language lab was launched. And now the Academic Language Lab is celebrating its 50-year anniversary.

Conference

After 30 days of work, the experimental reconstruction of the iron age canoe of Vlaardingen Vergulde Hand is finished! Its maiden voyage will take place on Friday the 16th of February when it will be paddled for the first time by schoolchildren from Vlaardingen.

The research article ‘Anatomy of a notch. An in-depth experimental investigation and interpretation of combat traces on Bronze Age swords’ is one of the most downloaded articles on the Journal of Archaeological Science website. This journal is one of the best for impact factor in the field. The article,…

On Thursday 26 June 2025, the Pavilion of the Wereldmuseum Leiden featured the first joint meeting of Leiden University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam around the shared research theme Collecting Global Heritage. Some 50 researchers, students and collection managers came together to share knowledge,…

In 2005 Leiden's municipal archaeologists excavated a 2,700-year-old canoe dug out from a tree trunk. Researchers from Material Culture Studies are now building a reproduction of this vessel using replicas of Iron Age tools. The researchers are hoping to gain a better understanding of the building p…

Getting young people excited about history is quite possible without books. Researchers from Leiden travelled to Morocco to work with schoolchildren on reconstructing cultural heritage in the popular video game Minecraft. The result: one virtual 14th-century city gate – and 20 teens with a greater appreciation…

Archaeologist Annelou van Gijn received an NWO Archeologie Telt grant to investigate domestic craft and subsistence activities of late Neolithic peoples in the coastal area of the Netherlands

Sara Polak, PhD researcher and lecturer at LUCAS, has won a Fulbright scholarship to work on her research on Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yale University from September 2014 till February 2015.

Lecture, Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series

The Faculty of Archaeology experiments with innovating their teaching methods, using 3D scans and visualisation technology to enable active learning. 'It makes archaeological material more accessible. Especially when it comes to fragile materials, it allows nearly anybody to analyse them.'

Two researchers from the Faculty of Archaeology have received a grant from the Museums, Collections and Society (MSC) interdisciplinary programme. This grant is for collection-based research. Jason Laffoon is using his grant for research into the origins of Central American turquoise, while Dr Marike…

For the third year in a row, the bonfires in the Duindorp and Scheveningen neighbourhoods in The Hague during New Year's Eve have been cancelled. According to Professor Henk te Velde, the fight for the bonfires represents something bigger: angry citizens.

What’s it like to study a certain programme within the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University? These prospective students found out during the Experience Day on Friday 6 April. They had a taste of the faculty’s atmosphere and discovered what study programmes are actually about.

The production of history is a process of power. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where during both the colonial and the post-colonial era history has been written by hegemonic regimes. This historiography has in turn (re-)produced structures of domination, social exclusion and division.…

In early modern England, courts of law were working overtime. University lecturer Lotte Fikkers delved into the records of centuries-old court cases involving women. In Early Modern Women's Life-Writing and English Law, she reconstructs how the story they told in court differs from the one they wrote…

Many of the language rules we use today were formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a dual track at the universities of Leiden and Brussels, PhD candidate Eline Lismont investigated why some rules became successful while other rules were quickly forgotten.

Marleen Hogendoorn (36) studied Dutch Language and Culture at Leiden University and is now editor-in-chief of the feminist monthly OPZIJ.

Raymond Corbey holds a chair in both Philosophy of Science and Anthropology at the Faculty of Archaeology, to which he has been attached since 1993. The faculty’s 'embedded philosopher', as Dean Kolen likes to call him, is hard to pin down in terms of the usual specialties at the faculty because of…

Lecture

Lecture, CMGI Brown Bag Seminar

Between 11 and 13 September 2025, the ESIL Annual Conference took place in Berlin, Germany. This year's conference unfolded on the theme 'Reconstructing International Law', attracting an unprecedented number of legal scholars from all over the world.

Roman philosopher and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is still used as an intellectual example by politicians and speech writers today. But, he did not go unchallenged in his own day, as a statesman in particular. Classicist Leanne Jansen conducted research into how classical historians judged Cicero’s…

To truly understand Dutch literature, we have to look beyond borders. At least, that is the view of Sander Bax. From 1 August, he will be Professor of Contemporary Dutch Literature and Culture in a Transnational Dynamic.

Materials like concrete, steel, plastic and fertiliser shape the world around us, but they’re also extremely polluting. If we want to build a more sustainable society, we can learn a lot from archeologists. How do we relate to these materials? And are there alternatives? Maikel Kuijpers is writing a…

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

In an article by the New York Times, cultural heritage law specialist Evelien Campfens discusses the difficulties surrounding the ownership of looted art.

It was while wearing clogs at a Dutch theme park in Japan that Cindy Heijdra really got to know Japan. Over 20 years later, she is studying again: to be a primary school teacher.

Next year in July Leiden University will receive around 1,500 Asia experts from around the world, for the 11th International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 11). This is the world's biggest Asia meeting. Besides an academic programme, the convention also offers an extensive cultural programme for…

The Choose a Language Day was created to make high school students enthusiastic about choosing a linguistic profile and further education. Third-years were able to learn about different language studies at the Faculty of Humanities.

The way in which written language is processed in the brain is a hot topic in cognitive research. Cognitive psychologist Rinus Verdonschot studied a Japanese script in which a single character can have up to three possible pronunciations. He discovered that all three are simultaneously activated in…

One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…

Exploring logging's real impact: Insights from Anthropologist Tessa Minter in the Solomon Islands.

An Iron Age skull, a unicorn for cleaning your ear and thousands of beer jugs. Alumnus and archaeologist Chris Muysson has made remarkable discoveries at the Binnenhof government complex in The Hague. ‘Each puzzle piece tells us more about its history.’

In the largest study of ancient DNA ever conducted, an international team of scientists has revealed the complex story behind one of the defining periods in European prehistory. The study is published this week in the journal Nature.

Political scientist Cynthia van Vonno’s (Leiden University) 2016 dissertation has been shortlisted for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Jean Blondel PhD Prize. Her study of party group unity in parliamentary voting was chosen from an exceptionally high number of nominations.

Dr Amy Strecker (Heritage Dept., Faculty of Archaeology) has recently been awarded a LGI BREED grant to develop her project on property and spatial justice in international law. Building on her previous research into landscape protection from cultural heritage, environmental and human rights perspectives…