Three lecturers from Leiden University have been awarded a €100,000 Comenius Teaching grant within the Senior Fellows programme. A further two lecturers have been awarded a €50,000 grant within the Teaching Fellows programme. The grants will enable the lecturers and their project teams to realise an…

What inspires scholars who study the history, cultures, religions and languages of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia? LUCIS interviewed scholars about their work and research in the video project “Passion in Profession”. The videos are available online now.

Over a decade ago the then foreign minister Abdullah Gül awarded me the “Medal of High Distinction” of the Republic of Turkey. I received the award, consisting of a diploma and a gigantic gold medal, during a festive ceremony at the Turkish embassy in The Hague. The reason I was deemed worthy of the…

This Philosophy bachelor's programme offers perspectives from around the world. It will make you one of the next generation of students who will shape philosophy in the 21st century, ready to take on academic or professional challenges that call for critical thinking, analysis and argumentation skil…

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Lunch Series '23/'24

Nadine Akkerman's book Spycraft, which she co-wrote with historian of science Pete Langman, has garnered top publications, with reviews featured in The Telegraph, Literary Review, The Spectator, History Today, and the Times Literary Supplement.

This project aims to revisit the relationship between the European cultural agenda and the local identity formation process, and social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine, when the British ruled via the Mandate. What was the role of culture in European policies…

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Conference, Summer school

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

How did the medieval manuscript develop as a physical object during the Twelfth Century Renaissance and what do these changes tell us about the intellectual culture of the period?

Lecture, Sociolinguistics series

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

When hobby divers revisited a nearly 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Texel, they discovered more than 1,000 objects in wooden boxes. Eight years later, postdoc Janet Dickinson used recovered books to compile a profile of the mysterious owner.

Nearly all documents from the 16th and 17th centuries were written by more than one person but attributed to only one author. Professor Nadine Akkerman wants to rectify this oversight in her research on scribes.

The aim of the research project is to get insight in the biostratigraphical age and the palaeoecological setting of the Schöningen sites and hominin behavior and subsistence during the late Lower Palaeolithic.

Update : March 2020 A.J. Mills

Many Asian countries are in a process of democratisation. The expectation was that citizens would gradually gain more control over the functioning of their elites. Experts from Leiden have concluded that this process often fails to improve the quality of the administration. They researched the nature…

An Investigation into the role of copper-alloy craft production in the early medieval economy of northwest Europe.

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

Every semester, LUCIS invites a scholar to Leiden to provide a lecture series on a topic of their choice. With these lectures, we aim to present state-of-the-art research in Islamic studies to the Leiden academic community and beyond, and to offer students and junior researchers the opportunity to get…

How do early modern states organize effective rule in difficult conditions? EMStaD YEMEN focuses on a country that due to its geographical, religious and social complexities is now considered a failed state – Yemen.

Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research) covers two years and can be studied in four programmes, one of them is the Assyriology (Research) programme. When you choose to study Assyriology, you will both be guided through the broadness of Assyriological sub-disciplines, as well as gradually led to…

In the master's programme Europe 1000-1800 at Leiden University you will learn to think comparatively about practices of power in premodern Europe in its global context.

For Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle East Studies

For Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle East Studies

How do migrants navigate key life events? Researchers from the Living on the Other Side project looked at the experiences of migrants who have settled in Morocco. During a recent tour through Morocco, they shared their insights with respondents and fellow researchers.

Uncovering ancient Arabian inscriptions feels like pioneering detective work, says Arabist Michael Macdonald in a video interview with Leiden Islam Centre LUCIS. 'First you have to learn the alphabets that they're written in, and then you have to try and work out what they say.'

PhD defence

How did early modern people find out about new knowledge? And did that make them more willing to accept innovation? In the coming years, we will study how and to what effect, new knowledge anchored among the wider public in the early modern Low Countries.

Bronze Age settlement sites in the Dutch river area (c. 2000-800 BC)

The Supplementa series of BABESCH is designed as a platform for thematic publications, in juxtaposition to the annual and varied mix of contributions offered by the journal itself. The thematic publications will include proceedings of colloquia, collections of particular studies by one or more authors,…

We live in a world of things and people in the past must have been as closely entangled with their material surroundings as we are now. In the Laboratory for Artefact Studies Van Gijn takes a close look at the biographies of objects: what kind of raw material an object is made off and what is its provenience,…

Chinese organisations increasingly operate across the borders of China, and growing numbers of people from outside China are coming to live there. Professor Frank Pieke believes these movements have a significant effect on central and local government policy in China.

The purpose of the initiative is to establish Central Asian Studies at Leiden University. Central Asia is a region with fluid borders stretching into present-day Afghanistan, Russia, China, Mongolia, Iran and the Caucasus; a premodern highway of global interaction and today increasingly important as…

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

In what ways do historical and current events affect how we should judge the legitimacy of political authorities?