Are you thinking about studying Arts and Culture: Art History and Museum Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Caspar Reuvens, the world’s first Professor of Archaeology, was a prominent classical scholar and from his appointment in 1818 onwards Classical & Mediterranean Archaeology has been an important field of research in Leiden.

Port cities develop at the intersection of international trade and commerce and at the interface between sea and land. What does the future of port cities look like with urbanization, sea level rise, new migrant flows and the disappearance of old industries? This is addressed in the minor (Re)Imagining…

The languages of the Mbam-et-Inoubou District of the Centre Region of Cameroon have a unique position in Bantu linguistics. Being in between

The MA Classics and Ancient Civilizations at Leiden University covers the entire range of present-day research on the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, Greece and the Roman Empire. In chronological terms, the program covers thousands of years, from the early origins…

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

From 1550 onwards, a great interest in the natural world developed across Europe. This interest was not only stimulated by a growing knowledge of local flora and fauna, but also by the import of numerous exotic animal and plant species. Think, for instance, of researches and collectors like Gessner…

This subproject, carried out by post-doctoral researcher Dr. O. Nieuwenhuyse, investigates changes and continuities in the functional, social and symbolic uses of the material culture, c. 6800-5800 BC. A contextually oriented approach is adopted, which pays attention to the local socio-economic and…

Conference

The aim of this thesis was to study the link between hearing loss, language skills, and social functioning in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Sufficient language skills are an essential prerequisite to develop appropriate communication skills, in order to join in conversations with others.…

What does it sound like when you create your own words in Chichewa? Can you decipher hieroglyphs after just one workshop? Visitors found answers to these and many other questions during the first edition of the Evening of Languages, held in the brand-new Herta Mohr Building. With a sold-out programme,…

This PhD project investigates the argumentative-rhetorical strategies by which the Russian state attempts to substantiate the legitimacy of its war against Ukraine.

This project investigates how sign languages change and spread over time, and how this is influenced by their transmission history.

This dissertation provides an up to date description of the Indo European lexical stock of Armenian (ca. 500 entries) with systematic inclusion of unused data that are found in Armenian dialects.

This dissertation is the first comprehensive description of Makalero, a language spoken by approximately 6,500 speakers in the Iliomar subdistrict, in the south-east of the Republic of East Timor. While previous sources considered it to be a dialect of the larger language Makasae, the present study,…

Before the modern nation-state became a stable, widespread phenomenon throughout northern Europe, multilingualism-the use of multiple languages in one geographical area-was common throughout the region.

In early medieval England, there was an interest in the history of the Roman Empire and kings adopted such imperial titles as 'imperator' or 'basileus'. How can we explain this interest and what functions did imperial ideas and the reception of the classical world serve in early medieval England?

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

Course, summer school

The pews of the Walloon Church were filled on Friday 23 May, as more than 120 former students of the French Language and Culture programme gathered to attend mini-lectures, a short theatre performance, and a discussion about the state of the discipline.

This master’s programme combines Physics with Data Science. You will learn how physics has its own tricks to deal with big data and how techniques from machine learning and deep learning can be applied to classical and quantum data. The first focus of attention is on classical data, including data mining,…

This PhD project investigates how grammatical features and lexical elaboration in Fulfulde Juguureere reflect aspects of cattle culture.

The Laiseang archiving project ensures the preservation of unique records of languages in the region which have been gathered by more than two dozen linguists at, and in collaboration with Dutch universities over the last 40 years.

This book presents an in-depth grammatical description of Kumzari, a mixed language spoken in remote villages on the Musandam Peninsula in northern Oman.

Conference

This thesis describes the use of the evolutionary approach in the study of language change, aiming to provide a better insight in the mechanisms that play a role in language change and to validate this approach in the field of language change.

This project investigates language choice and language use among Swiss mercenaries in the VOC and in the Dutch Colonial Army.

By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among P’urhepecha speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, this project will investigate the sources of language variation. The ensuing online dialect atlas will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

In the specialisation in Modern Languages you will explore the structure, acquisition, history and use of one or more of these five languages in depth: Chinese, English, French, German and/or Italian.

When and how was alphabetic writing introduced to Greece and the wider Mediterranean region?

In ancient Greece and Rome, nighttime encompassed a distinctive array of cultural values that went far beyond the inversion of daytime. Night was a mythological figure, a locus of specialized knowledge, a socially significant semantic space in various literary genres, and a setting for unique experi…

Given the accelerating appearance of antimicrobial resistance, there is an urgent need for more fundamental research into novel antibiotic strategies. The work in this thesis helps to address this global problem by developing new antibiotic compounds, inspired by the antibacterial mechanisms of the…

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.

Chinese Linguistics at Leiden University offers you an excellent opportunity to benefit from our long-standing expertise in Chinese linguistics

In his dissertation Michiel Hooykaas outlines the results of six empirical research projects focused at biodiversity awareness in the Netherlands, specifically people’s knowledge about animals.

On the 17th of January, Sarah Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Sarah on this achievement!

All the data stored and processed by our computers is encoded as sequences of zeros and ones, called bits. Quantum computers offer an alternative to this traditional way of encoding and manipulating information.

This book explores the production and use of medieval manuscripts that contain classical Latin texts. Six experts in the field address a range of topics related to these manuscripts, including how classical texts were disseminated throughout medieval society, how readers used and interacted with specific…

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

This proposal aims at the construction of a comprehensive and authoritative scientific grammar for Dutch and Frisian in the form of a virtual language institute: het Taalportaal/the Language Portal.