Although the world has made tremendous progress in health, education, sanitation and hygiene, global public health challenges still exist. Disparities in health exist between and within nations as evidenced by inequalities in disease burden, mortality, nutrition and environmental well-being. How does…

At the start of the 20th century there were fewer than 2 billion people. Now at over 7 billion, Earth’s population is on target to reach 8 billion by 2027. How has this dramatic increase in human population impacted Earth’s life support systems and natural resources? How should we understand the meaning…

Home to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, The Hague is the perfect backdrop to explore conceptions of justice in our global society. Questions of human rights, peace, security and the environment present legal and policy challenges for governmental and non-governmental…

The World Politics Major at Leiden University College The Hague examines the big ideas and the powerful forces – political, military, economic, social and cultural – that shape the world at every level, from the global to the local and everything in between. Political conflict is a key driver of many…

Study information, LUC 101 | Information Session

Ms. Monica Klasing Chen defended her thesis on 16 December 2020

Wrenching poverty, global inequality, violent political and ethnic strife, deadlocked, unresponsive or even collapsing governments, growing dissatisfaction with democracy and missed opportunities for innovation – these are merely some of the challenges of governance and development with which our programme…

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

Three years ago, on 13 October 2017, the Leiden Medievalists Blog was established. In their blogs, Leiden researchers from all disciplines talk about the Middle Ages in a fun and interesting way. Editors Jip Barreveld, Marlisa den Hartog and Thijs Porck talk about the blog and why the Middle Ages are…

The fourth edition of the Middle Eastern Culture market was a great success with more than 2000 visitors over the weekend. Attendees participated in the many workshops, attended lectures, and shopped at the market stands.

Over 200 people paid their first visit to the new Middle Eastern Library on a special open evening. As well as exploring the library, they got to see exhibitions, speed lectures and premieres about Leiden University’s Middle Eastern collections.

In this latest contribution to mimetic studies, Nidesh Lawtoo joins forces with leading international theorists of the posthuman to broaden the reach of the mimetic turn beyond human imitation.

The figure of the barbarian has captivated the Western imagination from Greek antiquity to the present. Since the 1990s, the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism has taken center stage in Western political rhetoric and the media. But how can the longevity and popularity of this opposition be accounted…

Leiden scholars succeeded in making Arabic accessible to Western academic communities as early as the sixteenth century. But how did they approach this problem?

On Thursday, May 16, Leiden University Libraries is organizing a workshop on early photography of the Middle East. In the workshop, curator Maartje van den Heuvel shows photos of three adventurous Dutch nineteenth-century travel and photography pioneers. They created beautiful photos and photo albums…

Five questions for James Shires, assistant professor at ISGA, about his new book, The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East. The book is available to order now.

On 19 February 2019, Mirjam Sombroek-van Doorm defended her thesis 'Medisch beroepsgeheim en de zorgplicht van de arts bij kindermishandeling in de rechtsverhouding tussen arts, kind en ouders'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. A.G. Castermans en Prof. mr. C.J.J.M. Stolker.

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…

From as early as classical antiquity there has been an interplay between literature and medicine.

The Modern Devotion: pone of the most influential religious initiatives in the late medieval Low Countries.

Since the end of the nineteenth century Arabic book designers have influenced the social and cultural situation in the Middle East with their work. Huda Smitshuijzen Abi-Farès has written the first global overview of this neglected field of science. PhD defence 10 January.

Persian stories with beautiful miniatures, letters on papyrus from Egyptian traders and medicinal manuscripts translated from Greek and edited in Arabic. Studium Generale organizes a lecture series on the world-famous manuscripts from the Middle East collection of Leiden University Libraries (UBL).…

On 1 November, Stijn Bussels assumed his role as professor of Art History, especially before 1800 at Leiden University. The chair is located at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

The ARTIVES project studies imaginaries of diversity portrayed by artists in Lisbon and Rotterdam in their films, performances and (oral) literature with the aim to explore their transgressive potential of opening up possibilities of thinking differently about migration-related diversity. Their stories…

Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media is dedicated to art practices that mobilize the model of the archive, demonstrating the ways in which such archival artworks probe the possibilities of what art is and what it can do.

Who assembled the collections of museums? The answer to this question seems to point to men as collectors. Apart from for rare exceptions, female collectors hardly seem to exist. Yet there were indeed women collectors. For the project Museums, Collections and Society, researcher Holly O'Farrell will…

With the help of the JEDI fund, Fatima al Moufridji and Thijs Porck went in search of cultural contacts between early medieval England, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Together they made four knowledge clips that can now be seen on YouTube.

'The Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia' explores the nature and implications of civil society across the region, engaging systematically with both theoretical approaches and empirical nuance for a systematic, comparative, and informative approach.

The central question of this thesis is: What drives late Middle Paleolithic stone artifact variability? In its attempt to answer this question, this thesis is a contribution to understanding variability within and between late Middle Paleolithic assemblages of the European Plain.

On 1 January Minna Valjakka was appointed Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory from a Global Perspective. Valjakka sees her appointment as 'extremely topical' because of the discussions about the decolonisation of the arts: 'Art teaches us not just about art, but also about contemporary…

Today’s performances of medieval polyphony have a lot in common with those of other ‘classical’ or ‘early’ music. Ensembles perform pieces written by known or lesser known composers, which the listener can revisit by listening to recordings or reading a score.

According to a number of British historians, the elderly had a particularly high status in the early Middle Ages. A new book by Leiden cultural historian Thijs Porck sheds a different light on the matter: elderly people had to earn that respect first, and old age was often described in negative terms…

Princeton University has officially launched its website, MAFE: Middle Ages for Educators. MAFE is aimed at university and secondary students and educators and, more broadly, at anyone who is interested in studying, teaching, or learning more about Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

On the occasion of Bart Besamusca's retirement as professor of Middle Dutch text culture in international perspective at Utrecht University on 25 January 2023, the digital exhibition 'The surprising Middle Ages' was created by medievalists from the Utrecht University Centre for Medieval Studies Over…

ACPA Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy Marcel Cobussen and ACPA PhD Supervisor Vincent Meelberg are, together with composer and Simon Fraser University Professor Barry Truax, editors of the recently published Routledge Companion to Sounding Art.

From 2 to 4 September 2024, the University of Fribourg organizes a three-day graduate course on multilingual manuscripts in the middle ages. Apply before: April 8, 2024.

A landscape-oriented chronostratigraphic approach to MIS 5 Middle Paleolithic open-air sites on the European Plain : case studies from Lichtenberg and Khotylevo I

From 11 to 17 September, Leiden will be all about art and science. What can the combination of these two domains do for us? And how can cooperation between them be strengthened? Several public events and a brand new symposium for specialists should answer these questions.