Several of the most important manuscript collections in the Leiden University Libraries (UBL) Special Collections, comprising 443 extremely rare and often unique volumes, have been made available in Open Access via Digital Collections. The available manuscript collections include the private collections…

Online, hybrid, on campus... It was an unpredictable year, also for the Faculty of Humanities. Luckily, there were also non-corona related stories. Let's review 2021 with this list of the most-read news articles per month.

Major renovations, much-discussed exhibitions and current museum related questions. ‘If you want to know what is happening in the art and museum sector in a very up-to-date way, then the 'Museum Talks' lecture series is the thing for you’, says Professor of Art History and organiser Stijn Bussels.

A devastating tsunami engulfed large coastal areas in Asia and East Africa in 2004. With over 170,000 dead, the Indonesian province of Aceh was hardest hit. The survivors proved to be remarkably resilient as they returned to everyday life. Anthropologist Annemarie Samuels went to live in Aceh, and has…

CFP : Journal of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society Graduate Conference Issue 9 (forthcoming –Spring 2021) In these confusing times, humanity is coming to grips with the loss of certainty and stability. Things that were considered evident in the past are increasingly being challenged…

NWO has awarded a Vidi subsidy to a total of 89 young and innovative researchers. Leiden researchers have won twelve of these subsidies and three subsidies have gone to the LUMC. Each researcher will receive up to 800,000 euro to develop a particular research theme or to set up a research group.

Cosmopolis seeks to explore the transnational and cultural dimensions of intra-Eurasian encounters through Dutch sources.

Diplomatic Studies (DIST) is a peer-reviewed book series that encourages original work on the theory and practice, processes and outcomes of diplomacy.

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy regularly publishes reviews of recent books within the field of diplomacy and global affairs, written in English, Spanish, French, or German.

The EU-funded project SKIES (SKilled, Innovative and Entrepreneurial Scientists) will train astronomy graduate students in transferable skills for academia and industry. SKIES integrates open science, social innovation and entrepreneurship topics. The project kicked off on 1 March and will run for…

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.”

Een uitbreiding van de NIMAR collectie van de Universitaire bibliotheken Leiden.

Many Humanities scholars keep a blog of their own. This summer, we’re putting these in the spotlight. For this week’s interview, we sat down with dr. Florian Schneider of the Politics East Asia blog.

Donald Trump was sworn into his second period as President of the United States on 20 January 2025. Since then, the Trump administration has raised alarms for people around the world who are concerned over what this will mean for the current geopolitical landscape. Join a panel of experts to discuss…

On the occasion of Euroscience Open Forum 2022, Professor Attiya Waris (Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Fiscal Law and Policy in Eastern Africa, University of Nairobi, Kenya), Professor Irma Mosquera Valderrama (Professor of Global Tax Governance, Lead Researcher GLOBTAXGOV ERC…

We want to be an engaged community where we feel heard and enjoy working together. But how do we have an open conversation about difficult topics?

For the Netherlands, like many other European countries, the nineteenth century was a period of strengthening national identity. Anne Petterson describes how 'the ordinary people' of Amsterdam expressed their patriotic feelings differently from how the elite had hoped. PhD defence 24 January.

Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a preliminary ruling in a case brought by Nicaragua against Germany. Nicaragua accuses Germany of genocide and violating international humanitarian law by supplying arms to Israel. Eric de Brabandere, Professor of International Dispute Settlement…

The president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has personally invited Jan Slikkeveer, professor of Ethnobotanical Knowledge Systems in Developing Countries, to give a lecture during the World Culture Forum. The Forum will be hosted in Indonesia from 24 to 27 November.

Amidst today’s armed conflicts, authoritarian governments, cyber-attacks, organized crime, economic insecurity, and ecological destruction, it can be hard to imagine peace. What do we mean by ‘peace’, beyond the absence of war? What kind of peace are we seeking? What makes people and society at peace?…

PhD candidate Manon Wintgens is using an algorithm to trawl through thousands of international tax treaties. She hopes to detect a system in the dizzying interplay between countries, businesses and documents. It is a unique research project.

Three PhD candidates from Leiden University have been awarded a Mosaic 2.0 scholarship for their PhD research. The Dutch Research Council (NWO) Mosaic 2.0 programme is aimed at an underrepresented group of graduates with a migrant background.

World history is often framed in terms of flows of people and migration: humans coming ‘out of Africa’, the spread of farmers in the Holocene, Phoenician and Greek diasporas over the ancient Mediterranean, the colonization of the world by Europeans from the 16th century onwards. Together with his Exeter…

Recently, Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and a research associate at the Department of Economics, were awarded a grant from the KNAW Statesman Thorbecke Fund. This grant will…

How can KLM remain the most sustainable airline? Master’s students from the Leiden Leadership Programme immerse themselves in practice and advise companies on major issues.

Spitting cobra venom composition has been influenced by defensive behaviour according to an international research team. This may have originated from the arrival of human ancestors. Students at the Institute of Biology Leiden made an important contribution to the study. Publication in Science on 22…

Four young Leiden researchers have been awarded a Rubicon grant to conduct research abroad. They will be working in Germany, the UK and the US studying such topics as the origin of galaxies and risk behaviour in young people.

The history of the LGTBI+ collective, deeply marked by episodes of violence, repression, and discrimination, is also the history of the struggle for social change and the conquest of civil rights, advances without which contemporary Western democracies could not be explained. More recently, the implementation…

Almost a hundred students and researchers can study in Leiden or go from Leiden to another university abroad as part of an exchange programme. Fourteen exchange projects have been awarded a subsidy from the EU's Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility programme.

Dark matter represents around eighty per cent of the total mass in the Universe. Yet, we still don't really know what it's made of. Astronomer Pavel Mancera Piña is looking for answers. With a Veni grant from NWO and the most advanced telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, he will investigate…

On January 28 and 29, 2021 the conference ‘Imperial Artefacts: History, Law and the Looting of Cultural Property’ took place online. This first of its kind event at Leiden University was an interdisciplinary online conference and brought together (post-)colonial historians, legal historians, curators,…

North Korean labourers are still being forced to work in the European Union. According to researchers, including Professor of Korean Studies Remco Breuker at Leiden University, Dutch companies are buying ships from a dockyard that uses North Korean workers.

Leiden bachelor's student of International Studies Thomas wrote a text that was read out this year in the UN Security Council by the Netherlands representative. How did he manage that?

The energy transition is already a huge challenge for society, but sustainable use of resources is even more complicated. Yet it is at least as urgent. Ester van der Voet has been working on it for decades, for example within the United Nations. Since February, she is a professor at the Centre for Environmental…

For her internship at the Textile Museum, master's student Evi van Stiphout researched the Surinamese cloths of the Leiden Cotton Company. Leiden and Suriname have a closer relationship than many people think. ‘Not much is written about Suriname’.

Leiden University’s Executive Board has appointed South African Professor Ann Skelton as the new Chair of Children’s Rights in a Sustainable World as of 1 October 2022.

Sarah Wolff has been professor of International Studies and Global Politics since 8 January. Time for a brief introduction about her field and academic interests.

Scientists of the faculty of Governance and Global Affairs research completely different subject, among which terrorism, cybercrime and migration. We give the floor to several of our very best researchers. In this episode: Caroline Archambault researches the Masai in Kenia.

The enormous adaptability of the cholera bacterium explains why it is able to claim so many victims. Professor Ariane Briegel from the Leiden Institute of Biology has now discovered that this adaptability is due to rapid sensory changes in the bacterium. Publication in PNAS.

All supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies appear to have periods when they swallow matter from their close surroundings. But that is about as far as the similarities go. That's the conclusion reached by British and Dutch astronomers from their research with ultra-sensitive radio telescopes…

It is with great sadness that we share the news that on Friday, May 3rd 2024, Carla Risseeuw, Professor emerita of CADS, passed away. Carla Irene Risseeuw retired as Professor of Intercultural Gender Studies from CADS in 2009 after a long and productive career.

An international team of scientists including Leiden's Joe Callingham has discovered nineteen red dwarf stars that unexpectedly emit radio waves. The outbursts possibly originate from interaction with exoplanets. The results of the research appear in two scientific publications.

On 14 November 2025, representatives from several organizations across the publishing reform and research assessment reform communities gathered in Pisa, Italy, for a workshop aimed at identifying and advancing joint actions to strengthen both movements.

Until now, systematic discussions of gender, race and law have received little attention from Dutch law faculties, especially at the undergraduate teaching level. At the same time, public calls for discussion of these issues increases rapidly.

On Wednesday the 23rd of March 2016, Prof. Richard Leakey, the world renowned palaeoanthropologist and conservationist from Kenya and Honorary Member of the LEAD Programme, visited the LEAD Office to contribute to a PhD Workshop.

Leiden Biology student Lukas Kiefer has won the Unilever Research Prize 2018 for his research into efficient production of a new antibiotic. Kiefer: ‘I want to make biological medicines available to people in need.'

On January 5, Rosa Winter will obtain her doctorate in arithmetic geometry. She researched solutions of equations that define so-called ‘del Pezzo surfaces’. ‘I like geometry because I can imagine and draw the shapes and objects,’ says Winter. ‘That makes abstract mathematics feel more tangible.’

Archaeologist Corinne Hofman wins the Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship 2018/19 for research into the changing world of indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism. “The perspective of indigenous communities is still lacking in most history books.

Visual art played an important role in the development of cooperative human behaviour. This is the finding of Larissa Mendoza Straffon, a PhD candidate in archaeology, whose dissertation explores the biological and psychological foundations of visual art.