The Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award is presented every two years on 10 December (Human Rights Day) in recognition of outstanding academic works in the field of international human rights.

‘It is a fantastic sum of money,’ enthuses classicist Professor Ineke Sluiter. ‘It gives me not just an award, but a task as well. And in all honesty, I prefer it that way.’ She is already brimming with ideas about what she will do with her Spinoza Prize.

Hester Bijl, the Rector Magnificus of Leiden University, was handed a ‘shockingly long list’ of names of missing Iranians in her office at the Administration and Central Services department on 13 December 2022.

‘It is a fantastic sum of money,’ enthuses classicist Professor Ineke Sluiter. ‘It gives me not just an award, but a task as well. And in all honesty, I prefer it that way.’ She is already brimming with ideas about what she will do with her Spinoza Prize.

In this blog post, Linda Slapakova discusses the various roles that AI plays in counter-disinformation efforts, the prevailing shortfalls of AI-based counter-disinformation tools and the technical, governance and regulatory barriers to their uptake, and how these could be addressed to foster the uptake…

In our digital society, the internet seems to offer endless possibilities for expressing yourself, gathering information, and making contact with others. The anonymity of the internet seems to give us the freedom to come and go as we please. But what about our online privacy? Should it be dealt with…

Plants produce an astonishing variety of secondary metabolites (SMs) which are thought to play vital roles in the fitness of plants through ecological interactions.

Ebru Alazi ‘hacked’ an enzyme-producing system in the fungus Aspergillus niger in order to produce renewable energy more easily. She manipulated the fungus, making it produce more pectinases: enzymes mainly used in the food industry and in the production of renewable energy, such as biofuels. Promotion…

Plant biologist Pingtao Ding, assistant professor at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL), has received a 2.4 million European grant from the European Research Council (ERC). This ERC Starting Grant for promising young researchers allows him to unravel the molecular mechanisms by which plants resist…

Baroque flautist Jed Wentz followed two years of dancing classes in order to develop the right feeling for the gestures required for the Baroque French opera genre ‘tragédie en musique’. On 9 December Wentz defended his PhD thesis on the subject, and on 8 December he gave a concert in the context of…

Five researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an Open Competition Domain Science ENW XS grant by the Dutch Research Council for their research projects.

Throughout all domains of life, from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, genomes adopt well-organized three-dimensional structures that can change in space and time to accommodate preferred transcriptional programs for environmental adaptation, the maintenance of cellular identity and differentiation…

Knowledge and culture subproject 2:

The project investigates epistemicity: how the knowledge of the speaker and hearer can be expressed in the grammar. This shows us how speakers organise their knowledge, and whether this is influenced by the language they speak.

This dissertation presents the first full grammatical description of bago ts'amakkilo ('mouth of the Ts'amakko'), or simply Ts'amakko. It is a Cushitic language, spoken in Southwest Ethiopia and belongs to the Dullay cluster of Lowland East Cushitic. The number of speakers is about 10,000. The data…

Politicians' statements often involve emotions, shaping public perceptions. This study highlights the role of emotions in EU foreign policy.

When combined and used by specific people located in time and place, words can express something more than, different from, or even the opposite of their dictionary meanings.

On the 15th of July Sawako Takemura successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

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,…

In this article, Seda Gürkan & Rosa Sanchez Salgado show which emotions the Members of European Parliament (MEP) expressed in the wake of Qatargate.

Netherton Syndrome (NTS) is a rare genetic skin disease caused by mutations in the serine protease inhibitor Kazal-type 5 gene, which encodes the lympho-epithelial Kazal-type-related inhibitor. NTS patients have a profound impaired skin barrier function. Because SC lipids play a crucial role in the…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. den Hertog

Both psoriasis and atheroslcerosis are diseases characterized by a chronic and systemic inflammatory profile with local lipid disturbances that alter the barrier function of the skin (psoriasis) and cause the development of atherosclerotic plaques (atherosclerosis).

Real-life processes are characterized by dynamics involving time. Examples are walking, sleeping, disease progress in medical treatment, and events in a workflow.

Corporeality, intimately bound to the notion of space, to the diffuse border that connects, entangles, and fuses an inside and an outside, is understood in this book as a space which puts the individual at stake as a war machine that, in its fight for a form of life, redefines political territories.

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotores: L.T.M. van der Ven, A.S. Kienhuis

The Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion (LUCSoR) is part of the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).

On the 2nd of September, Hang Cheng successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Hang on this achievement!

This study examines the mutual intelligibility between all 225 pairs of 15 Chinese dialects, in two main branches, i.e., six Mandarin dialects and nine non-Mandarin (Southern) dialects.

Promotor: S.M. Verduyn Lunel, Co-promotor: O. van Gaans

Ruobin Han defended her thesis on 21 March 2017

The vegetative growth period for leafy vegetables like lettuce is essential for yield and quality.

This thesis comprises four closely related interpretative studies and set out to answer the compound question: ‘How do teachers interpret their classroom interactions in terms of their pupils’ best interest?’

Lu, Man defended his thesis on 28 September 2017.

Book historian Erik Kwakkel found an intriguing snippet of text earlier this week, that bears unexpected evidence of some of the problems encoutered by early printers: censorship and the affiliated fuss of seeking and printing Church approval.

During the corona pandemic, the Chinese government's digital communication with its citizens changed. Hard propaganda was increasingly replaced by ‘soft news’. PhD candidate Dechun Zhang mapped the developments in digital society.

During the next three years, 6 promising researchers from the Faculty of Humanities who have just been awarded their PhDs will be able to further develop their research ideas funded by a Veni grant from the NWO. A total of 147 Veni grants were awarded of which 14 went to researchers at Leiden Univer…

Performance, Subjectivity and Experimentation in Artistic Research: An Interdisciplinary Seminar

Herta Mohr, Witte Singel 27A, 2311 BG, Leiden

Democracy is under pressure all over the world. With the #DemocracyinAction project, university lecturers Sara Brandellero and Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues want to investigate how grassroots art projects manage to keep democracy alive.

Source: Purinergic Signal., Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 441-53 (2014)

Supervisor: Andrea Martella

Promotores: H.S. Overkleeft; G.A. van der Marel Co-Promotor: B.I. Florea

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

Promotor: Prof.dr. H.P. Spaink Co-promotor: Dr. B.E. Snaar

This dissertation investigates whether and how gradability is manifested in the nominal domain, as well as the implications this could have for theories of the representation of gradability.

BACKGROUND: Explant human skin equivalents (Ex-HSEs) can be generated by placing a 4mm skin biopsy onto a dermal equivalent. The keratinocytes migrate from the biopsy onto the dermal equivalent, differentiate and form the epidermis of 1(st) generation Ex-HSEs. This is especially suitable for the expansion…

In love, we like to use great words. We promise to love each other ‘forever’ and praise the beloved as nothing less than ‘the one’ . Meanwhile, we know very well that we don’t live eternally and that we may find our ‘true love’ one day on the opposite side of the divorce table. So why do we continue…

The ties between Leiden University and South East Asia, especially Indonesia, have been strong for centuries.