The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (the NVIC) was founded in 1971. Nine universities in the Netherlands and Flanders participate in the institute with an aim to stimulating internationalisation of their teaching and research activities in the Middle East.

Do you want to discover a language and culture that is completely different from the Netherlands? In the Bachelor's programme Middle Eastern Studies you will study the connections between the different cultures in the Middle-East in the past and present. You will be able to choose from the languages…

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world.

It is late June, and on a windy meadow north of Leiden known as the Vrouw Vennepolder a group of archaeology students just hit the last ice age. Considering this involves manually pushing a ground core to a depth of 10 meters, this is no small feat. Even so, the taking of ground samples in this, at…

Land van Ons, a cooperation that buys agricultural land for the restoration of biodiversity and landscape, and Leiden University join forces. Together, they will investigate over a longer period of time which agricultural management leads to the best restoration of biodiversity. The research will start…

PhD defence

On Thursday 27 June 2024 Sigrid van Roode successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

On Tuesday 10 September 2024 May Shaddel Basir successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

A technique originally developed for satellite imaging can now be used to recover pictographic texts from underneath the surface of a five hundred year old Mexican manuscript.

The excavation of three Bronze Age barrows and surrounding landscape at Apeldoorn-Wieselseweg

Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions research area will be presented on 9 September, in the form a conference. The keynote speaker is Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of the Asia Research Institute of the Singapore National University. The title of his address is Sustainability and…

Archaeologists often use the percentages of heat-affected stone or bone artifacts found at archaeological sites as a way to determine how frequently fire was used by the inhabitants. Andrew Sorensen and Fulco Scherjon have come up with a computer model called 'fiReproxies' to simulate how fires used…

Dr Alex Geurds was elected as a Fellow for the Society of Antiquaries, a prestigious and old educational charity based in London. Established in 1707, the society aims at the encouragement and advancement of the study and knowledge of the antiquities.

To what extent is the image of the Taino settlements on Hispaniola representative for the whole island, or is it only related to a few large settlements of known caciques?

Dr. Moritz Jesse, associate professor of European Union Law at the Europa Institute Leiden, addressed the members and audience of the panel “Citizenship and the Refugee Crisis” at the World Conference of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York, which took place at Columbia University,…

Dr Ruixuan Chen, an alumnus of the LIAS and now assistant professor in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg, has been awarded the Ernst Waldschmidt Prize. The award ceremony is postponed due to the pandemic and will take place in Berlin presumably in early 2021.

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

In August 2022 we welcome our new colleague Dr Letty ten Harkel as Assistant Professor in Roman and Post-Roman Archaeology. For the past ten years she has built up an impressive track record in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Read the interview about her background and research…

One and half years ago, Lewis Borck exchanged the arid and hot Southwest of the USA for the Netherlands. While an expert in Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam archaeology, he switched to the Caribbean as a researcher in the NEXUS 1492 project. “Theories and methods brought me in first.”

Career Event

‘I was very happy and honoured that my thesis was recognised as a valuable contribution to the topic of landscape archaeology.’

During World War II, the Nazi’s ordered a coastal defensive line to be built from the south of France to Norway. This Atlantik Wall aimed to defend their territories in continental Europe from an Allied naval invasion. The defensive line went right through the Dutch city of The Hague. The material remains…

An overview of the Middle-East studies research projects at Leiden University where faculty and students cooperate. Coming fall 2024!

The Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University ran an excavation project in Northern Syria, at Tell Hammam al Turkman, some 80 km north of Raqqa. The Faculty of Archaeology and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research N.W.O. finance the undertaking, which is directed by dr Diederik J.W.…

To be eligible for Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

Leiden University’s Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies programme is a one-year, full-time Master’s programme that is taught completely in English. Building on a tradition of more than four centuries of studying the Middle East, we offer highly relevant and up to date insights into a wide variety of…

Forty archaeology students are holding a shovel somewhat awkwardly in the fields at Oss. This is their first day of fieldwork and they are going to use muscles they didn’t even know they had.

The past two years, Laura van der Knaap and Professor Karsten Lambers worked on creating open teaching materials on agent-based modeling, funded by Erasmus+ and in collaboration with Danish, Irish and Dutch partners. Programming is an important skill involved in this, which is often seen as intimidating…

Together with colleagues from the Stimson Center and in the framework of the Global Governance Innovation Network, Dr. Joris Larik has recently published the report

On Wednesday 23 October 2024 Judith Jurjens successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Nico Staring, researcher in Egyptian art, culture and history, is taking part in the Leiden-Turin excavations in Saqqara, Egypt. The site of Saqqara is interesting because it was utilized as a cemetery but also the veneration of gods for a period of more than 3000 years, between ca. 3000 BCE to the…

New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 words ago were less traditional than was thought. The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Archol, the National Museum…

The Case of the Painted Plaster

Understanding the history of Islam and Muslim societies sheds a clear light on the complex and changing social structures of the Middle East, including the current trouble spots whose effect spreads all the way to Western Europe.

This is the Board of Advisors of CompaRe.

The one-year master's in East Asian Studies, a specialisation of Leiden University’s master's in Asian Studies, offers focused study of either China, Japan or Korea.

In the article “Neanderthals and Us: We’re More Alike Than Once Thought”, we are reminded that many negative traits, from unintelligent to unsophisticated, have long been attributed to Neanderthals in popular culture. However, recent studies bring to light an ever-increasing amount of evidence contradicting…

Archaeologists from Leiden University are contributing to Grens, a theatre performance in Leiden’s Matilo neighbourhood.

Investigating the contribution of interpreters, informants, hunters and guides in the making of colonial scientific knowledge.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…