Throughout the coming year, all attention in Leiden will be on Asia. This special year, featuring numerous Asian events, conferences, exhibitions and concerts, celebrates the new Asian Library at Leiden University. Come and read, watch, listen, taste or dance Bollywood style.

As of October, Joeri Reinders has joined the Leiden Teachers’ Academy, a group of innovative lecturers who each receive a €25,000 grant for projects focused on educational innovation. For Joeri, this revolves around sustainability and climate change.

On 5 May we celebrate freedom, a basic human right that should not be taken for granted. We asked international students and staff what it means to them.

Rianne Vink, one of the student counsellors, explains what a student counsellor does.

How does audio-visual material shape the identity of people when those people do not own their own land and are being oppressed? Bahar Simsek delved into the effect of film on the Kurdish identity. She will obtain her PhD on 4 May.

Public procurement is not a hot topic for the average citizen. That’s a pity, says PhD candidate Erik Plas, who did research on the fair spending of public money: 'If a council project goes completely haywire, because it costs more than expected, it could even mean that local taxes will have to be r…

Following years of negotiations between Member States and the European Parliament, there’s finally been a breakthrough for migration policy. What does it mean for the Netherlands, exactly? Mark Klaassen, Assistant Professor in Immigration Law, discusses this on various media channels.

A clear, unambiguous definition of an extraparliamentary cabinet still seems to be missing in the political arena of The Hague. Caroline van der Plas, Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) party leader, wants to discuss this issue with the party chairs of the Dutch coalition parties. Wim Voermans, Professor…

How do local, non-institutional ideas about end-of-life care influence professional palliative care and vice versa? These questions will be answered by medical anthropologists Annemarie Samuels and Natashe Lemos Dekker in the coming years.

With the long lockdown, it’s been a hard year for Leiden businesses. How can the local economy bounce back and how can the University help? Two talk shows discussing this were recently recorded in the Academy Building. They will be aired on Unity TV on 28 September and 12 October.

The book: Hegemony and World Order: Reimagining Power in Global Politics will be published this week. Jan Aart Scholte: 'We hope that students, lecturers and policy makers will start to think differently because of this book'

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…

No evidence found that increasing migration leads to an increase in politically and ideologically motivated criminality. Migration flows have, however resulted in increased polarisation in the Netherlands.

Hardly ever before have different groups in the population retreated into their own bubble as much as they are doing today. Professor of Sociology and Law Maartje van der Woude and her students will be examining the effect of social distancing on relationships. How do the people of Leiden look at students…

In 2019 Leiden University was 444 years old. This special birthday called for a special celebration. We celebrated this milestone with the residents of Leiden and The Hague. In, with and for these two cities.

Annually the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology awards the Speckmann prize for the best Fieldwork NL report, as well as the most accomplished master’s thesis.

Joana Cook talks about the Islamist parties increasingly taking power in the last four decades on ABC News.

In a lecture for the University of the Netherlands, Reijer Passchier, assistant professor in constitutional and administrative law, speaks about the state of our democracy. ‘Is it not time to upgrade our democracy?’

How can we improve the everyday sounds of the city? In his inaugural lecture on 28 November Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture, advocates using the expertise of sound artists to raise the quality of acoustic environments in cities.

Today is the general election in the Netherlands – although the polling stations have actually been open for two days already because of the coronavirus restrictions. Leiden researchers and students are involved in all manner of ways, and are analysing the campaigns and possible results.

Different groups can have different memories of the same historical event. This can lead to conflict but does not have to. How is this, and how can countries and people reconcile with the past?

Rutger Leukfeldt, special chair of Governing Cybercrime, and colleagues investigate the link between Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) factors and self-protective online behavior.

Child marriage has become an increasingly important topic on the international human rights and development agenda. Many organisations are calling for a ban, but what problem would such a ban solve? PhD defence on 18 March 2020.

On 21 January, the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) has released two reports on circular economy and urban mining in the Netherlands. In them, together with Statistics Netherlands, they take stock of part of the Dutch ‘urban mine’: how much raw material can we reuse from the electricity grid,…

It occurs on a regular basis: a public administrator resigns or is dismissed when their integrity is at stake. To what extent does that damage their image? Geerten Boogaard, Professor of Local Government, discusses this in an item published by regional public broadcaster ‘Omroep Gelderland’.

Protests against textbooks on trans persons in America and against a reading hour by drag queens in Rotterdam: it has been raining protests recently against people with a gender expression that does not match their birth sex. Why does this evoke such resistance? We asked Professor by special appointment…

More people seeking asylum, overcrowded asylum accommodation and asylum procedures that take years because of a lack of capacity. The current government wants to declare an asylum crisis but what is that exactly and can they just do that?

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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…

Leiden University will be conferring three honorary doctorates in its special anniversary year. They will be awarded to Eliot Higgins, truth finder and founder of Bellingcat, Bonnie Honig, expert in feminist theory and legal theory, and Kelly Chibale, professor of organic chemistry, who works on prevention…

Jaïr van Rhenen studied Medicine in Leiden and is now a GP in the largely religious Veenendaal. Before this, he worked as a tropical medicine doctor in Lesotho. ‘If you have the prospect of an afterlife, you often respond differently to illness.’

Assistant Professor Space Law Tanja Masson-Zwaan appeared as a guest on the Radio Weetlust programme of local Leiden radio station Sleutelstad FM. She talked about, among other things, who does the moon actually belong to and why we all would like to go there so badly.

For the Bachelor Honours Class 'Mass Extinction', students produced podcasts about the past, the present and the future of mass extinctions. What exactly is lost when a species goes extinct? What are the practical consequences? But also: does humanity have the moral duty to protect other species?

X’s guidelines prohibit manipulated and misleading media. And yet owner Elon Musk recently posted a video of Kamala Harris with an AI voice. Professor of Law and Digital Technologies Gerrit-Jan Zwenne talks to Dutch newspaper ‘de Volkskrant’ about what Musk is and is not allowed to post.

Over the recent period there have been a number of protests and demonstrations at universities by people who oppose the universities’ collaboration with the fossil fuel industry. Students and staff in Leiden are also expressing their concerns about this issue. We are now publishing a list giving an…

The LOFAR e-infrastructure group is responsible for deploying and maintaining LOFAR processing on distributed e-infrastructure. A co-operation between SURFsara, Leiden University and ASTRON, the group develops software to integrate the LOFAR stack with processing pipelines. Our software can schedule…

A civil servant employed by the municipality of The Hague was cause for discussion after taking part in an Extinction Rebellion protest. Only under additional conditions could the employee in question stay on at the municipality. She decided to resign. According to Barend Barentsen, Professor of Labour…

Leiden University has become more sustainable in the past few years, but it could do better, particularly in the area of teaching and research. A student and staff workgroup is preparing a new Sustainability Vision 2030. Programme Manager Daphne van den Berg explains how this is taking shape and where…

Eva Michaels talks about the current international security environment, including intelligence issues with Sir John Sawers in an interview in El País.

On Wednesday 5 June, Kalin Anev Janse, Secretary-General and Management Board Member of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), was invited to give a lecture on 'Bridging decision-making: a new direction for Europe? Prioritising financial stability: the European Stability Mechanism and the Banking U…

On 31 January 2024, Alex Schilin defended his dissertation ‘United in Distinctiveness: The Institutionalisation of Differentiated Integration in Economic and Monetary Union during the Sovereign Debt Crisis.’ What motivated him to research this specific topic, and how did he tackle this project? And…

Tech company Eyeball collects images and data on young amateur football players on a large scale. But is this allowed? Bart Custers, Professor of Law and Data Science, and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne, Professor of Law and Digital Technologies, comment on the issue in ‘NRC’ newspaper.

The Municipality of Lelystad is using a new kind of council agreement: a general agreement that all parties are entitled to have their say on. As Professor of Constitutional Law Wim Voermans recently said on Dutch current affairs programme ‘EenVandaag’, this form of agreement would also lend itself…

In what settings do great ideas turn op? Quanta Magazine follows top scientists to their favorite places to think, tinker and create. Leiden astronomer Ewine van Dischoeck showed the magazine the Noordwijk beach. 'Somebody from the Netherlands is unavoidably linked with water.'

Leiden’s Religious Studies ranks 40th place in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

As a psychologist and pilot, Bert Busscher is interested in the phenomenon often termed as fear of flying. Busscher discovered that the heart rate of a person undergoing a therapeutic flight shows how much they still suffer from fear of flying. The post-flight heart rate can even predict whether the…

PhD student Camil Staps is continuing his academic career in Berlin. He receives a Rubicon grant to do research there on demonstrative pronouns.

Piercing through the skull with an ice pick, administering electric shocks without an anaesthetic, or applying leeches to the uterus: these may seem like medieval methods of torture, but they are in fact therapies used in medicine. Willem van der Does writes about all of them in his new book. ‘Physicians…

Hoping to learn something about the human brain, Leiden researchers are creating a setup to shoot single photons, particles of light, into someone’s eye. ‘The eye is a passageway to the brain.’