To maximise your personal development, we ensure tutorials are small-scale and staff members extremely accessible. In year one, you’ll have an average of 12 contact hours, half of which comprise lectures (in English) and the remainder tutorials (optionally Dutch or English).

They hurtle along at over a thousand kilometres per second: the fastest stars in the Milky Way. PhD candidate Fraser Evans conducted research into these elusive hypervelocity stars and discovered that they have a lot to teach us, about black holes and supernovae, for example.

With the help of software that mimics a human brain, ESA’s Gaia satellite spotted six stars zipping at high speed from the centre of our Galaxy to its outskirts. This could provide key information about some of the most obscure regions of the Milky Way.

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

Lecture, Research Seminar Europe 1000-1800

International organisations that represent collaborations between States are becoming increasingly more powerful, and they have an increasing impact on our daily lives. For example, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg established that minors have a right to legal aid immediately following…

This collection brings into conversation several kinds of scholarship on medieval authorship which have tended to remain separate over the last two to three decades, a period of steadily increasing scholarly interest in this topic.

By choosing Leiden University, you’ll be choosing to broaden your personal and academic horizons. You’ll be in excellent company too because you’ll be part of an inspiring community of students, lecturers and professors from all over the world. Founded in 1575, ours is the oldest university in the N…

The Institute for History announces vacancies for three PhD positions on Rethinking Disability: the Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective and one PhD position to conduct research on the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

This project explored the role of material culture, in casu painted plaster and its technologies, in expressing dynamic social identities and in forging complex interwoven human relationships in the context of the Middle to Late Bronze Age of the Aegean and East Mediterranean.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

The various bodies involved in the administration of LIAS are listed below.

Lecture

Lamberto Zannier, Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), gave a lecture on ‘The OSCE, a bridge between East and West and a platform for dialogue on European security’

Dutch agents, military personnel, prosecution personnel and diplomats in Ukraine have been spied on by intelligence services from Ukraine and Russia after the MH17 disaster. Reliable sources reported this to RTL Nieuws. The espionage by Ukraine is very sensitive, because it is highly unusual that espionage…

The radio sky harbours both galactic and extragalactic sources of arcminute- to degree-scale emission of various physical origins. To discover extragalactic diffuse emission in the Cosmic Web beyond galaxy clusters, one must image low–surface brightness structures amidst a sea of brighter compact fore-…

Outflows are crucially important for the gas budget and evolution of luminous star-forming galaxies and AGNs, with observed mass outflow rates of the same order as the star formation rate. Greater star formation and black hole growth lead to more intense feedback and outflows, resulting in self-regulated…

Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political turmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens.

Following the Big Bang, structure in the Universe started collapsing under the force of gravity. This resulted in the formation of the first stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Multiple stars, that is two or more stars composing a gravitationally bound system, are common in the universe.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families—one knightly and one mercantile—with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and…

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Kaveh Lahabi's lab explores the exotic physics of quantum materials, whose underlying physics seems to have more in common with elementary particles and black holes, than ordinary metals and semiconductors.

Elizabeth Stuart is one the most misrepresented – and underestimated – figures of the seventeenth century. Daughter of James VI & I, she was married to Frederick V, Elector Palatine in 1613 – they were crowned King and Queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be deposed and exiled to the Dutch Republic in…

In his book The magic of healing, Willem van der Does talks about 14 pioneers in the history of psychiatry. These pioneers all had one thing in common: they started with a radical idea which led to great enthusiasm.

In 'Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800', Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman, both of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and also affiliated with the History Institute of Leiden University, assemble an internationally acclaimed selection of authors,…

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

The Jeugdwerkgroep is a national astronomy association for young people who are interested in astronomy. The Leiden section organizes a monthly meeting in the Old Observatory Leiden.

The high velocity tail of the total velocity distribution of stars provides essential insight into fundamental properties of the Galaxy.

Although nanoparticles are extensively used in various applications like consumer products and have most probably entered the environment, little is known about the effects of these particles on living organisms.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Zaanen, A. Parnachev

Everything you need to know about the minor American Studies.

An overview of Professional Associations and Journals

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson

Team Global History of Knowledge

This is the physics summer school of Leiden University. It is part of the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION). The summer school is intended for Bachelor (BSc) students in physics. It covers topics from quantum matter and optics, to biological & soft matter physics and cosmology and theoretical physics.…

Over a seven year period an international team of scientists has mapped more than a quarter of the northern sky using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a pan-European radio telescope. From Leiden, Astronomer Timothy Shimwell and Huub Röttgering, among others, are involved. It reveals an astonishingly…

Research organisation NWO has awarded a VICI grant to five Leiden researchers. In total, 32 leading researchers in the Netherlands have been awarded a VICI grant.

Our research regularly receives attention in the (Dutch) popular media. Here is an overview.

In personal stories, university staff and students with different backgrounds reflect on our colonial and slavery past. How does this history affect the present and the future?

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

This publication of the School of Advanced Study of the University of London is one of the outcomes of the Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project and the Colonial Rural Networks project (NWO, Dr. T.D. Stek). The volume, edited by Tesse Stek and prof. Gert-Jan Burgers of the Free University Amsterdam,…

An Introduction and Field Guide, Second and Revised Edition (15 December 2014)