Africa has a population of 1.5 billion. In 30 years’ time, this will be 2.5 billion. The continent’s impact on the global economy, but also on the environment, will therefore increase drastically. Researchers from the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) have been aware for decades of the crucial role…

Nederland ligt in de periferie van het verhaal van menswording. De evolutie van onze familie vindt lang exclusief in Afrika plaats. En, als Europa eenmaal bewoond wordt door mensachtigen, ligt het zwaartepunt ten zuiden van onze streken. Toch heeft ons land een aantal interessante vindplaatsen en vondsten…

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: Dr. V.S.F.T. Merckx

The Voices of Africa platform is ten years old and has just recently won the annual popularisation prize of the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT). High time for a chat with Jenneke van der Wal, Maarten Mous and Nina van der Vlugt about the importance of the platform and plans for the…

Meer dan twee derde van alle ontheemden op de wereldwijd zijn geen vluchteling, maar zijn ontheemd in eigen land. Zij worden volgens deskundigen veel te weinig beschermd.

The Leiden Jewish Studies Association awarded the inaugural “Best Thesis in Jewish Studies” in December 2023.

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

Facts, Fears and the Future of Islamic Rules on Family Relation in the West

For decades, the trade in pocketbooks prescribing how to be a good Muslim flourished in East Africa, but in recent years the number of books in circulation has been declining. University lecturer Annachiara Raia is the recipient of an Impact Explorer grant to revive this tradition, in cooperation with…

Studying the underlying principles of the nature of language.

The academic staff of the Leiden University Institute for History.

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

The present monograph, spanning a wide range of world and local literatures represents a high academic standard of both literary criticism and philological analysis. By demonstrating her expertise as an Africanist conversant with the Arabic canon, Raia reveals how the narrative of Joseph has been re-narrated…

Most of the PhD graduates (about 70 percent) find a job outside of academia. The majority of them successfully embark on a career in education, administration, heritage, journalism, or business. Other PhD graduates find employment in an academic or semi-academic environment. A considerable number of…

The study of language in change.

Context and contents of the Izcatqui manuscript in the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam

Attention to the colonial past may be increasing, but many aspects of it are still underexposed. Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in collaboration with, among others, Leiden researchers Anne-Marieke van der Wal-Rémy and Alicia Schrikker, therefore created a 'canon of the Dutch underexposed past', which…

If you follow the western media, you are likely to think of ‘Africa’ as the continent of origin of desperate migrants, a continent of hunger and disease and a breeding ground for international terrorism. But if you want to see the bigger picture, you should look no further than the African Studies scholars…

Opportunities to join the initiative as a guest researcher and spend time in residence with GTGC in The Hague are available. If you are interested, we welcome you to contact us. Below you can find our current and former guest researchers.

Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

Research on the global field of museums, heritage, commemoration, consumption and material culture

In this project, we aim to obtain a quantitative understanding of the role of the immune system in tumor regression, of the role of tumor cell heterogeneity in cancer growth and of tumor cell migration properties.

'Psychologists think I’m a linguist but linguists think I’m a psychologist,' says cognitive neuroscientist Xiaochen Zheng. With the Veni grant she will be able to bring these two fields of research closer together. Read her answers to five questions.

In 1933, Maria Ulfah Santoso was the first Indonesian women to earn a law degree. During her studies in Leiden University she became involved with Indonesia;s nationalist movement. She went on to be Indonesia's Social Minister, as the first female cabinet member. In this article, historian Wildan Sena…

Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) particles have been extensively studied as biodegradable delivery system to improve the potency and safety of protein-based vaccines. In this study we analyzed how the size of PLGA particles, and hence their ability to be engulfed by dendritic cells (DC), affects…

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

Het project heeft plaats gevonden onder begeleiding van Prof.dr.ir.Tjerk Oosterkamp. De titel van de presentatie is:

On December 6th, 2024, Rector Hester Bijl welcomed participants at the Leiden Jewish Studies Association’s First Annual Conference “Jews at Home: From Creation to Corona” and also presented two Leiden University students with the inaugural Leiden Jewish Studies Association “Best Thesis in Jewish Studies”…

Hifadhi ya Dijiti ya Ustadh Mau

Since August 2013, Alanna O’Malley is the new Assistant Professor for International Studies at the Institute for History, Leiden University.

What was the social function of the colonial civil law courts in eighteenth-century coastal Sri Lanka? Why did people choose to have their disputes settled by Dutch law courts?

Description of 20th century changes in the Dutch flora: Description and interpretation (1999 - 2005)

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

We should mention differences in skin colour to our children because only then can we talk openly about prejudice and racism – and how to prevent them. This is what Professor Judi Mesman says in her book ‘Opgroeien in kleur’ (Growing up in Colour), which offers advice to parents. ‘Why is there only…

From 25-27 June 2017 the 3rd Conference of the Labour Law Research Network took place in Toronto, Canada. Beryl ter Haar participated in two panels. The first panel dealt with strike law from a comparative perspective between South Africa, Russia, The Netherlands, and Europe. The contribution of Beryl…

Jos Winnink will defend his PhD dissertation, entitled “Early-stage detection of breakthrough-class scientific research”, on Wednesday February 22, 2017 at 3 pm. The two PhD supervisors are Prof. dr. Robert Tijssen and Prof. dr. Anthony van Raan (both at CWTS, Leiden University).

Light reflects from a mirror, but where exactly does this reflection happen? Well, it depends, Martin van Exter and Corné Koks discovered. Their precise calculations, published in Optics Express, are important for designing optical cavities for quantum communication.

Brandon Zicha (Leiden University College The Hague) had always been critical of the teaching system at universities. But it was only when he passed the Senior Teaching Qualification at the end of last year that he was able to explain exactly what was wrong with it.

To properly understand how babies absorb a language we need to study the process from a number of different perspectives, linguist Claartje Levelt argues. She accepts her appointment as Professor of Language Acquisition on 27 March with an inaugural lecture entitled ‘Language in its infancy’.

Last Wednesday was the official deadline for students to apply for one of our master’s programmes. Some of our master’s programmes, such as History, organised a last call Q&A for students.

Below you will find an overview of all PRE-Classes provided by the various programmes of Leiden University. For each section, you can find a description of the content and more specific information about the requirements for participation in the Class.

Pushing the limits and trying things out. The academic year of the Honours Academy started on 10 October and all the speakers encouraged students to jump in at the deep end.