When it comes to literature, people mostly talk about what characters see or hear. Rarely is it about what they smell. That’s a shame, thinks university lecturer Jan van Dijkhuizen. He has been awarded an Open Competition grant from NWO to expand academic knowledge about scent in literature, and to…

As part of the NWO-funded research project ‘The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders, c. 1200- c. 1500’, we invite proposals for 20 minute papers addressing any aspect of medieval literature and literary culture. We welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages—and…

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Wenxin Wang defended her thesis on 26 October 2016

This research will investigate which aspects of On the sublime received attention in the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century and how the sublime found its way in the political and artistic discourse of that time. Thus I aim to shed light on the role of art in politics and society in this…

How does global change across time and space lead to convergence and loss of variation or increasing diversity and conflict?

A platform to research memory and culture in the Muslim world. This programme explores the ways modern memory studies methodologies can be applied to pre-modern Muslim societies to reveal the uses of the past and senses of tradition in diverse contexts of Muslim thought.

MaDiTraCe’s main goal is to enlarge and integrate the portfolio of technological solutions reinforcing the reliability of critical raw material (CRM) tracing and the transparency of complex supply chains.

Conference

This research tries to create a coherent comprehension of misfit, enhance conceptual knowledge, highlight prevalent knowledge.

This article explores crisis communication research clusters in the literature, examining overlaps and intersections among diverse fields.

Form and Function in Greek Grammar. Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Greek Literature is a new book, written by Albert Rijksbaron. Rijksbaron is internationally known as one of the leading scholars of the Ancient Greek language, whose work has exerted a strong and lasting influence on the scholarly…

Galikyan’s dissertation examines how the multidimensionality of learner­learner interaction data and the multifacetedness of learner-learner interaction itself impact the measurement of learner-learner interaction in digital learning environments.

A new publication on changes in the relationship between news and their public in Chile

With the help of quantum mechanics, digital quantum hardware may be able to tackle some of the problems that are too difficult for ordinary computers. But despite these expectations and the ongoing effort of the research community, reliable quantum computers are not yet realized in a lab setting.

The Digital Lab is open! This new lab is meant for staff and students who are looking for a place to work, experiment, and find support for their digital research. There’ll be a kickoff event, with live digital demos and a roundtable on “the Humanities in a Digital World” on Friday October 29 in the…

Since 1 January Leiden has a new graduate school. The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), previously based at the University of Amsterdam, has moved to the Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

A mixed qualitative/quantitative approach to medieval disability aids using both literary and artistic sources.

On the occasion of the Workshop organized last July to officially launch the Leiden Chinese Queer Collection (LCQC), the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL) donated 30 titles of Taiwanese LGBTQ+ literature to support this initiative. These works where published between 1971 and 2022 by authors…

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship? Want to learn more? Then sign up for the new MOOC…

What does it mean to perceive smell? This question fascinated poets and playwrights of the early modern period (ca. 1500–1700): their work abounds in references to and evocations of smell sensation and of specific scents. POEM maps the ways in which early modern writers put the language of smell – or…

How do you recount historic events if you are not allowed to talk about them? For his dissertation, Taufiq Hanafi tried to find out how a period of mass murder – despite heavy censorship – found a place in Indonesian literature. PhD defence 31 March.

What is the difference between a minister saying that something is possible or that it is not impossible ?

The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

Utrecht University is hiring an assistant professor Medieval English Literature. Candidates are invited to apply before April 6, 2024.

On Wednesday 25 June 2025 Dechun Zhang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Author Gustaaf Peek, who has been nominated for the Libris Literature Award, studied English Language and Literature in Leiden. ‘I completely submersed myself in literature during my studies, and the effects are still with me today.'

Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor of Law & Technology at eLaw, was interviewed by EUobserver and Al Jazeera English on the European Commission’s newly unveiled Digital Omnibus package – a set of proposals that would amend the GDPR, the AI Act, cookie rules and parts of the EU’s cybersecurity…

A new Special Issue with Transnational Legal Theory edited by Jelena Belic, Matthew Canfield, Henning Lahmann, Rachel Griffin, and Barrie Sander, brings together a collective of perspectives to unpack the promise and perils of human rights as a vocabulary for governing digital platforms.

The linguistic project constitutes the connection between the two other subprojects. It consists of two parts.

Terms used by literary critics in characterizing the style of novels are often impressionistic (‘baroque’, ‘austere’, ‘vivid’, ‘cerebral’ etc.). Foundations for such evaluations are usually not provided. A scientific way of studying and explaining style is lacking in present day Dutch Studies. Suzanne…

Alumnus Peter Burger – along with his colleague Alexander Pleijter – is the face of fact-checking in the Netherlands. ‘My degree led straight to this.’

The Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University is a partner in the new university-wide Data Science research programme that advocates the use of data science in various fields of research.

This special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik (Brill, 2021) brings together articles that explore new digital ways of analyzing and annotating Old English vocabulary.

On 11 June 2020, Sabine Witting defended her thesis 'Child Sexual Abuse in the Digital Era: Rethinking Legal Frameworks and Transnational Law Enforcement Collaboration'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.J. Sloth-Nielsen and Prof. S. van der Hof.

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.