In this article, published in Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia Online, Erik de Maaker posed three questions. How can the persistence of the community religion, albeit marginalized, be explained? What role is left for the practices, objects, and beliefs associated…

In contemporary India, the regional state of West Bengal has often been perceived as somewhat of an aberration in the wider context of a rather chaotic democracy, as the Left Front (spearheaded by the Communist Party of India-Marxist, CPIM) demonstrated a rare instance of political stability, decisively…

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

The Pontine Region Project (PRP) is an on-going archaeological project that aims to study the long-term history of settlement and landscape in the Pontine region

The Intelligence and Security Research Group at Leiden University explores how intelligence and security services function within political, bureaucratic, and societal contexts, and how their methods can be enhanced.

Southeast Asia is a term to denote a collection of at present eleven nation-states with an enormous diversity in languages, cultures and religions. Muslims can both take a majority and a minority position.

Stylianos Irakleous defended his thesis on 6 February 2020

This reflection for Critical Studies on Terrorism, explores two decades of the 'War of Terror' and what it means today.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Cryptocurrencies have exploded onto global financial markets, with the value of a single bitcoin growing from around 800 USD in 2016 to 67,000 USD in 2021.

Research at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) focuses on linguistic variation and diversity. In order to create more awareness and scientific understanding of this topic, research activities are clustered around six (overlapping) umbrella programmes. Many of our researchers are active…

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?

This article discusses local expressions of crisis in Beed district, central Maharashtra. Both in public and academic discourse crisis has become the term of choice for the many structural deficiencies which make agriculture an increasingly precarious livelihood in India. While most voices subscribe…

On Thursday 21 November 2024 Jake Benson successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Join the Pipe is a project committed to reduce plastic waste and to provide people both in the Global South and in the Global North with drinkable water.

Besides the Hortus being a beautiful place where visitors can relax and learn more about plants, we also facilitate botanical research. Thousands of plants are cultivated for research purposes in our greenhouses. These include tropical orchids, ferns, the soursop family (Annonaceae), the dogbane family…

This volume considers the military architecture and its impact on local communities in Rome's eastern frontier, which stretched from the north-east shore of the Black Sea to the Red Sea.

You’ve been accepted! Leiden University looks forward to welcoming you as a new student. Your next step is to prepare for your studies. Below you can find some tips to help you get a head start as you embark on your studies at Leiden University.

Get the most out of your studies at Leiden University by taking part in our extracurricular activities.

Get to know us through our online and in-person events for prospective students!

Get the most out of your studies at Leiden University by taking part in our extracurricular activities.

Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is one of the broadest of its kind, offering courses in no fewer than 80 different languages and a very broad spectrum of academic disciplines.

If you are interested in an academic programme, but do you not wish to complete the entire programme? Then, you can choose one of the many à la carte courses the Faculty of Humanities offers.

Auke-Florian Hiemstra is the Leidsch Dagblad Person of the Year 2022.

AMT’s mission includes encouraging innovative high-quality research in Leiden on Asia. On this page you will find an overview of AMT related research projects, grant possibilities, publications and vacancies.

Leiden University opened its doors on Leiden Museum Night, with a whole host of things to see and do at the Academy Building, Hortus botanicus and Old Observatory. Take a look at the photos and see.

Resilient Diversity: the Governance of Racial and Religious Plurality in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800

In the research project ‘Furthering public leadership’ the Leiden Leadership Centre collaborates with several public organisations in order to obtain academic insights on public leadership and to develop leadership in practice. This allows for evidence-based development of public leadership and direct…

What is Leiden University doing to make its buildings future-proof and independent of fossil energy?

Since January the Dutch public have been able to follow a free course on artificial intelligence (AI) and its far-reaching impact on our lives. Leiden scientists Marlies van Eck and Valerie Frissen, from the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of the Law at Leiden's Law Faculty, are part of the…

Wouter Halfwerk (IBL) received a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for his research project on the influence of man-made noise on foraging birds.

Leiden researcher Ethan Mark has a mission, he explains in the alumni magazine Leidraad. He wants us to take off our Eurocentric glasses when we study the Second World War. We have focused on ourselves for far too long; after 75 years, it’s about time we listened to stories from the rest of the worl…

Many students and members of staff at Leiden University are politically active. In the run up to the local elections on 21 March candidates in The Hague and Leiden explain why you should vote for them, and what they want to do if they are elected. In this article, the Leiden candidates.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help humans in many different ways: from customised medicine and self-driving cars to preserving our cultural heritage. On 4 April academics from Leiden will talk about the achievements and opportunities of AI. A research dossier on AI is also online now, which looks…

Global Interactions sponsors a number of research projects of Leiden University researchers.

This one-year, English-taught Master's programme offers insights on general developments as well as the specific challenges in the field of the governance of crisis and security, with in-depth knowledge of sub-fields of crisis and security management.

People in Asia increasingly feel the need for a strong identity. This is the consequence of developments such as globalisation and the realisation that Asian countries such as China and India are becoming new world powers. Professor Hilde De Weerdt studies how political ideas and national identity spread…

The majority of scientists, from archaeologists through to zoologists, collect enormous volumes of data. Their massive databases contain large amounts of information which is difficult for humans to filter. With a solid grounding in statistics and computer science, we can develop algorithms for analyzing…

Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies analyses the role of religion in past and present understandings of Asia.

The coastal site of Butrint is situated on a peninsula in south-western Albania, opposite the island of Corfu and Apulia in southern Italy (across the Adriatic Sea). In Medieval times, Butrint served as a connecting bridge between East and West – between Byzantium and the Latin world.

Leiden Asia Centres

This project explores the decline of shifting cultivation in Northeast India. What is the impact on society of people’s deepening engagement with markets and the state?

How have human-environmental entanglements changed in the Gulf of San Miguel, Darien, Panama, from the first traces human practices through to the present?