Conference

Professor Ariadne Schmidt and Associate Professor Arie van Steensel (University of Groningen) have produced A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Leiden, the first English-language history of Leiden. Mayor Peter Heijkoop received the first copy.

Conference

What role did inequality play in the past? On Friday 5 December, Master's students in history presented their answers at a conference they organised themselves.

Are you an interdisciplinary researcher working on or with heritage? Do you struggle with faculty fragmentation and finding relevant colleagues to collaborate with? How can we at Leiden facilitate interfaculty knowledge exchange? These were some of the questions which inspired eight Leiden University…

UNESCO has recognized a large collection of handwritten letters and the archive of Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879-1904) as documentary world heritage. Kartini opposed gender inequality in feudal Javanese society, including forced marriages, polygamy and lack of education for women.

University lecturer Gerlov van Engelenhoven was to be a guest in one podcast by culture maker and anthropologist Yanise Zijlstra on intangible heritage. The collaboration went so well that they are now making a short film together for young people.

Assistant professor Fenneke Sysling spoke in National Geographic about the return of the ‘Java Man’ to Indonesia.

If you wish to find out about current construction projects, you will find an up-to-date overview of Leiden University construction projects below.

Leiden University restores, modernises and builds for the users of its buildings in Leiden and The Hague. The building stock is very diverse: from historic buildings in the inner city to advanced laboratories at the Leiden Bio Science Park.

Constructive alignment is a core principle of educational design. It ensures that you design courses, materials, activities and curricula with which your students can achieve the learning objectives you set out for them.

An endoscopic camera was used to record images of reused medieval fragments on the inside of book bindings from the 16th and 17th centuries. The unique images were made as part of the project ‘FragmEndoscopy: An Innovative Way to Discover Hidden Heritage inside Early Modern Book Bindings’, funded by…

Ward Hoskens started ten years ago as an intern at one of Leiden's most iconic buildings: the Pieterskerk. Now he is doing his PhD on the question of how the function of this 'church that is no longer a church' changed over recent centuries.

University lecturer Aya Ezawa has received a Certificate of Commendation from the Japanese Embassy in the Netherlands for her efforts to promote reconciliation between the Netherlands and Japan, in particular by supporting Japanese-Indonesian war children. As a member of the Foundation for War Victims…

On Thursday 26 June 2025, the Pavilion of the Wereldmuseum Leiden featured the first joint meeting of Leiden University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam around the shared research theme Collecting Global Heritage. Some 50 researchers, students and collection managers came together to share knowledge,…

Over the past year, historian Fenna IJtsma delved into 'four centuries of historical greenery'. As part of the Heritage Deal, with input from biologists at Naturalis and others, she looked for inspiration and examples from the past to contribute to a future climate-proof city centre.

If you wish to find out about current construction projects, you will find an up-to-date overview of Leiden University construction projects below.

On 3 September 2025, more than 30 archaeological objects were returned to Peru, Panama and Costa Rica. The objects come from a private collection belonging to the descendants of physician and amateur archaeologist Dr Hans Feriz. In her will, his daughter stipulated that the objects collected by her…

Anna van Buerenplein, Anna van Buerenplein 301, 2595 DG, The Hague

More than 40 years ago, a wrecked merchant ship was found in the Wadden Sea. PhD student Geke Burger looked at this archaeological find from a historical perspective.

Workshop

How can you figure out if a skeleton is male or female? How did they brew beer in the distant past? Visitors to ArcheoHotspot could examine archaeological finds and taste prehistoric drinks at the Faculty of Archaeology.

Conference