Lecture

Zār jewellery from Egypt can be found in many museums and private collections in the West, but for a long time very little was known about it, except that it was used in rituals to protect against spirit possession. PhD candidate Sigrid van Roode has explored its history and discovered that the jewellery…

A linguistic reconstruction of the migration of the Tocharians from Europe to China

De menselijke geschiedenis strekt zich ver uit vóór de tijd waarin de mensen opschreven wat er zoal gebeurde.

Nietzsche's most famous and infamous book Thus Spoke Zarathustra is perhaps the most read, but probably also the least understood, book in Nietzsche's oeuvre. Nietzsche considered it his highlight. He called it a symphony, a holy book, a fifth gospel and even the greatest gift ever given to humanity.…

Recently, Austrian physicists succeeded in placing minuscule metal spheres with a diameter of 0.000008 millimetres into superposition.

How does Russia use propaganda and what characterises Russian propaganda in terms of language and argumentation?

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

1000 Years of World History in 100 Old Maps.

This PhD project investigates the different ways in which honorific forms are used in Japanese other than to express politeness, and how different factors affect perceptions about these uses.

Optimally solving real-world expensive Black-Box Optimization (BBO) problems w.r.t. real-world constraints, such as wall-clock time and computational costs, is extremely difficult and tedious.

In Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, Emeritus Professor Mineke Schipper reflects on myths about ‘the end’.

In this opinion article published in World Development, the authors present five research and policy priorities. While it is clear that ‘pluriversal’ designs need to guide the way forward (Kothari et al 2019), defining a set of key pillars can provide direction and purpose across this pluriversality.…

What’s really happening in the space between the cells in your body? With the Collagen Canvas project, students from Leiden University invite you to explore this question by blending science with art. This interactive artwork immerses you in the dynamics of the extracellular matrix—the invisible structure…

79 students, 15 organisations, and 16 projects: within the master’s programme Governance of Sustainability, diverse groups of students worked together with organisations to tackle sustainability challenges. In this blog, Annemiek de Looze reflects on how the power of their transdisciplinary approaches…

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.

Classical mathematical models treat space and time as a continuum, while it is sometimes more useful to regard it as granular. Hupkes is studying what this means for a number of important patterns that are often found in computer calculations and in nature.

Insect egg development in a warming world: the eco-evo-devo of embryonic developmental time: What is the genetic basis of developmental time?

Where to study ’politics’? According to the QS World University Rankings, Leiden University is a good choice. In the 2021 edition, Leiden and The Hague retain their position in the top 25 of the most esteemed institutes worldwide. Within the Netherlands, we again claim the first position.

Izra ter Weer's mother had studied English Language and Culture in Leiden and was always so enthusiastic about her studies that Izra decided to follow in her footsteps. After completing a Master's degree in Linguistics, she now works as a consultant at strategic consultancy firm Sprenkels and organises…

On Tuesday 10 September 2024 May Shaddel Basir successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In early modern Europe, as today, men and women with expertise in languages were indispensable to the functioning of societies and economies. The LangPro project will shed new light on these early modern language professionals and on the field that employed them: the language sector.

Associate professor Eric Storm discusses the return of imperial ambitions in global politics on The Conversation. He argues that leaders like Putin, Xi, and Trump challenge the post-WWII international order.

A portrait of the complex historical process of over 500 years of European colonialism in the New World.

This book examines the critical role of information and knowledge in early modern Europe's global pursuits, exploring challenges in trusting distant information, the development of doubt in intercultural encounters, and the impact of misinformation.

When and how was alphabetic writing introduced to Greece and the wider Mediterranean region?

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

Leiden alumna Tulasi Das moved to England to pursue a career in film, was accepted onto the BBC Trainee Scheme and now works in London as a researcher on historical documentaries. “I still can’t believe I get to do such cool work.”

This project looks at the Ancient Greek language from the perspective of the ordinary writer. A large corpus of more than 60.000 Greek texts on papyrus, from private letters to petitions and contracts, offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-literary writers in…

The project focusses on how US views of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia influenced its strategic interpretations of the region.

Are there general principles or values that should govern our actions as moral agents and/or as political subjects?

The successful PRINS (PRactising INternational Studies) project offers International Studies students an introduction to the world of practice. In the last semester of their bachelor’s programme, they work as consultants for real-life clients, ranging from Rabobank to Greenpeace. We took a look at the…

NTER-SECTION is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on contributions from junior archaeological researchers at Leiden University. The journal offers an accessible platform for the publication of individual research by undergraduate and graduate students. The Editorial Board consists of PhD…

Imagining the Americas in Print contains eleven essays, seven of which have been published before and four of which are new.

Last week Hanneke Bennaars and Yvonne Erkens visited the World Congress of the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law (ISLSSL) which was held from 4 to 7 September 2018 in Turin, Italy. The theme of the congress was “Transformations of Work: Challenges for the National Systems…

This book published by Oxford University Press discusses religion and trade in world history.

Bacteria caught red-handed, deeply frozen just as they were about to cause Lyme’s disease. Ariane Briegel is wildly enthusiastic about the wonders she observes thanks to three elements: a freezing technique, a camera-equipped microscope, and AI. ‘It’s fascinating. Every single cell is different.’

Sheltering is an immediate human need and determines well-being andhealth.

Who had a say in making decisions about the natural world, when, how and to what end? How were rights to natural resources established? How did communities handle environmental crises? And how did dealing with the environment have an impact on the power relations in communities?

From towering mechanical heroes to city-destroying battles, giant robots have become one of the most iconic images in Japanese animation. On 28 April 2026, Leiden University will host

A young refugee who wants to give something back to the Netherlands; a Greek girl who wants to study in her mother's home country and, of course, a lot of Dutch bachelor's students. The visitors to the Leiden Master's Day on Friday 11 March were as diverse as the range of programmes offered.

This project aims to excavate and date the setting of the east gate of the Roman fortress of Udhruḥ. This will be compared with other Diocletianic military installations from the region. We also hope to retrieve another gate inscription which can shed light on the function and political embedding of…