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.

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

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…

The relative simplicity of the bacterial cell, short generation times and well defined and inexpensive culturing conditions have significantly contributed to our understanding of many complex biological systems. Yet the workings of the bacterial genome, seemingly impossibly compressed within a tiny…

This article examines to what extent bureaucratic responsiveness depends upon the source, the content and the salience.

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).

Every organisms in the tree of life faces the same challenge: the length of its DNA exceeds the volume of the cell it needs to fit in. Several strategies have evolved to solve this problem, one of them being the expression of proteins that bind and organize the DNA.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. den Hertog

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

Ruobin Han defended her thesis on 21 March 2017

This thesis provides explicit expressions for the density functions of absolutely continuous invariant measures for general families of interval maps, that include random maps and infinite measure transformations, not necessarily number systems.

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

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

Lu, Man defended his thesis on 28 September 2017.

Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is one of the leading international research universities in Europe. Its motto is Praesidium Libertatis – Bastion of Freedom

Leiden University is building an open, learning organisation. We aim to forge a strong university community that is characterised by mutual trust and collaboration and grounded in both freedom and responsibility. To achieve this ambition, we are committed to developing the leadership skills of all our…

The English Language and Culture programme focuses on four areas, namely: philology, literature, linguistics and language acquisition. It also offers several specialisation options, ranging from renaissance literature to the use of metaphors.

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

The seminar is dedicated to the work-in-progress of Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy staff and doctoral students. The paper is sent in advance and discussed in the meeting. The seminar is open to all. Venue: Lecture room or zoom.

Few people would associate the name Anton de Kom with Leiden. Yet the Surinamese freedom fighter is the subject of an exhibition at Museum De Lakenhal.

The 3 years bachelor's specialisation Heritage and Society offers a versatile programme in which you explore the cultural heritage of past and current societies. With your obtained knowledge you will learn to better understand cultures from the past. Moreover, with your insights in societal issues in…

Gert Oostindie, Emeritus Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History, is this year’s Cleveringa Professor at Leiden University. He was appointed by the University on 4 October. In his inaugural lecture on 24 November, entitled Courage and Disregard, he will talk about (academic) freedom in relation…

Leiden physicists exploit self-assembly of small particles to someday create functional structures such as micro-robots from the bottom up. They have now taken an important step forward by experimentally realizing joints at micrometer scale. Publication in Nanoscale.

Ten years ago, a new reward system was introduced in Dutch prisons: the only way prisoners could earn extra ‘freedoms’ was through good behaviour. Jan Maarten Elbers concludes that this system does little to encourage behavioural change and can even be counterproductive.

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

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…

The making of sacrifices seems part and parcel of any elite sportsperson’s life. Remarkably, the insights that we find in the current literature in social sport studies are not able to make sense of the references to sacrifice in the data that emerged in the context of this study on the social significance…

Our mission: a positive impact. Our vision: community. By involving the world around us in our education and research we make a positive impact. We do this by applying Open Science.

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

The research presented in this thesis concerns one of the most important questions in software engineering of our time: how can we make sure that software is free from memory safety bugs?

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) was established in 1919 based on the premise that social justice is a condition for lasting peace. On 7 February 2019 the ILO celebrated its 100th anniversary with an international symposium to consider the future of the ILO.

Below some examples of ACPA projects that have a meaningful impact on arts and society. This page will be refreshed every now and then with other projects that exhibit how arts research bears upon our perception, our understanding, and our relationship to the world and other people.

No matter how hard Chinese communists tried to control the economy, they could not stop the free market from flourishing. This was the message given by historian Frank Dikötter on 7 February during a lecture on the Cultural Revolution. He will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate on 8 February.

Arsenaal, Arsenaalstraat 1, 2311 CT, Leiden

Schouwburgstraat, Schouwburgstraat 2, 2511 VA, The Hague

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi admires Israel’s achievements, but structural differences between Indian and Israeli national security situations, differences in the leaders’ worldviews and the absence of a common enemy inhibits stronger strategic rapprochement, argues political scientist Nicolas…

Van Steenis, Einsteinweg 2, 2333 CC, Leiden

Supervisor: Andrea Martella

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

How can we find novel natural products from Actinomycetes that act as growth modulators on mammalian cells? Can we harvest and develop the potential of these novel compounds for industrial and medical biotechnology?

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.

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

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,…

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

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.

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…

We have studied shape with a particular focus on the zebrafish model system. The shape is an essential appearance of the phenotype of a biological specimen and it can be used to read out a current state or response or to study gene expression.

Streptomyces are multicellular, Gram-positive bacteria in the phylum of actinobacteria which produce a high amount of bioactive natural products of which the expression is tightly coordinated with the life cycle.

How did institutions and structures operate throughout the Muslim world from the earliest history of Islam into the early modern period?

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.