Palestinian national Abu Zubaydah was captured by the CIA in March 2002 and has remained in detention ever since, without any form of trial. Leiden professor Helen Duffy is doing all she can to secure his release or a fair trial. Her hopes now lie on international pressure and the UN Working Group on…

A love of puzzles and the patience of a saint: these are two essential traits for linguists wishing to explore the Indo-European language family. Fortunately, Professor Michaël Peyrot possesses both. In his inaugural lecture he will take the audience on a voyage of discovery to the past.

Mirjam de Bruijn and camerman Sjoerd Sijsma have been travelling through Chad and Cameroon. The Arab spring hasn't arrived there yet, but the effects of internet and mobile telephony show in everyday life. Mirjam and Sjoerd look for counter voices: young people who try to change these countries in their…

The map application includes information from old and new buildings archaeological projects. This makes it possible to investigate whether water facilities (wells, cisterns) and waste facilities (cesspits, sewers) were the privilege of Leiden’s wealthy elite in the late 16th and 17th centuries or whether…

The ARTIVES project studies imaginaries of diversity portrayed by artists in Lisbon and Rotterdam in their films, performances and (oral) literature with the aim to explore their transgressive potential of opening up possibilities of thinking differently about migration-related diversity. Their stories…

Lecture

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2019, as well as special appointments and royal distinctions.

Here you can find an overview of the Erasmus+ projects undertaken by Leiden University since 2015.

The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

Lecture, Asia Academy

Lecture

PhD defence

PhD defence

PhD defence

Lecture

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

The brand-new American President Donald Trump delivered his inaugural speech on 20 January. There was little sign of conciliation and he was liberal with the truth, in the opinion of a number of Leiden academics. One professor is more positive: 'He wants to take on radical Islam.'

More than fifty researchers are working together to describe the colonisation of the Americas from the Amerindian perspective. In November they will be meeting for the first time, in Leiden. How is Corinne Hofman, Leiden Professor of Archaeology managing the international megaproject Nexus 1492?

Lecture, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars

In the context of the summer school "Medieval Religon" prof. Christopher M. Bellitto (Kean University) will give a keynote lecture on June 26th: "Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and Today: Thoughts of an American Medievalist". This lecture is also open to those interested who do not participate…

On the 24th of March, Prof. Ton Liefaard gave a lecture at the Girne American University entitled ‘International Children’s Rights: Achievements and Challenges’.

The American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS) is organizing a panel at the 2023 International Medieval Congress in Leeds entitled "Relics and Reliquaries in Iberia, c. 1000-1400: Stories, Places, and Identities". Papers on any topic regarding the cult of saints, their material…

Floris Heidsma is a student in the MA North American Studies. He is currently spending one semester in Canada as an exchange student at the University of Calgary. On TheLeidener blog, he shares some of his experiences of living and studying in Canada.

Tim Rietbergen, master student Evolutionary Biology at Leiden University, won the award for the best Leiden University Fund (LUF) grant application of 2018. The jury praised his proposal ‘On the origin of Bats’ to be the most creative and of exceptionally high quality. Rietbergen will spend the prize…

An online course to teach our international students their first words in Dutch, American presidents in Leiden and how Neanderthals made the very first glue: view a selection of our most read English news in the past year.

Like last year, Leiden University is the third Dutch university in the 2016 Shanghai ranking. Leiden is ranked 93rd among the world's 500 best universities.

Rowie Stolk, PhD candidate at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law has been admitted as a visiting researcher to UCLA School of Law (University of California, Los Angeles) where she will stay during the first semester 2019 – 2020.

At the end of June 2021, The Dutch Ministry of Finance made a policy document public that dates back to 2016. In it, civil servants acknowledge that the Netherlands risked providing unauthorized State aid to American multinationals by allowing them to use a controversial, but favourable, fiscal construction:…

Carla Cisternas Guasch, PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for History, is one of the winners of the 2023 call of the Slicher van Bath de Jong Foundation for the advancement of study and research on the history of Latin America. She receives a research grant of €10.000 (max).

Many of our staff and students have won an award, received a grant, obtained an academic fellowship for their quality or have been socially engaged due to their specific expertise. See below for an overview per year.

Six programmes in the Faculty of Humanities have been awarded the designation 'top programme' by the Keuzegids. These are the bachelor’s in German Language and Culture, Greek and Latin Language and Culture, Latin American Studies, Ancient Near East Studies, Religious Studies and Russian Studies.

The American historian and Japan specialist Carol Gluck is the new Leiden Cleveringa professor for the 2014–2015 academic year. On 26 November 2014 she will give the Cleveringa inaugural lecture, in which she will examine how World War II is commemorated in Asia.

As a young boy, Gabriel Inzaurralde, lecturer and researcher in Latin American studies, wanted nothing more than to become a writer. He still writes and passes on lessons from Latin American literature and culture to his students. 'My lectures are a constant attempt to reopen closed minds.'

Three of our researchers have been awarded a certificate for receiving enough downloads to be in the top 10% of papers in 2022

Randal Sheppard recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in International Relations. He introduces himself.

The midterm elections in the United States will be a vote of (no) confidence in president Trump and his divisive leadership style, says Brendan Carroll, assistant professor Public Administration. In this blog he explains why voter turnout can be a decisive factor.

The American historian and Japan specialist Carol Gluck is the new Leiden Cleveringa professor for the 2014–2015 academic year. On 26 November 2014 she will give the Cleveringa inaugural lecture, in which she will examine how World War II is commemorated in Asia.

The objectives of the 2011 campaign Tell Balata Archaeological Park are to carry out excavations, promotion and awareness, community involvement, gathering oral histories and educating children. The objectives are described in a handout produced for the opening ceremony on June 21st 2011.

Leiden chemical biologists led by Dr Mario van der Stelt have developed a method to facilitate the search for new drugs. This method has allowed them to take an important first step in the development of a drug against obesity.

Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary-General of NATO, gave a guest lecture at Leiden University on 19 April. His message was clear: increased international tensions call for greater investments in defence. According to Stoltenberg, the Netherlands is not one of the big spenders in this area.

From 17 to 19 September, the University of Granada organized the 27th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM).

Can we truly connect with each other through video calls? Yes, according to a recent study. Psychologists found our bodies synchronise almost as much in digital conversations as in real life. But this doesn’t mean we should skip in-person meetings altogether, says researcher Fabiola Diana.

On October 21st, 2019, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, handed out the National Prize for the Youth in the academic achievement category to our PhD candidate Omar Aguilar Sánchez. He received this honour for his work on Mixtec pictorial manuscripts.

During the 76th American Psychosomatic Society conference in Louisville, Kentucky from 7-10 march 2018 Aleksandrina Skvortsova was awarded with one of the APS Scholar Awards. Stefanie Meeuwis was honored to present her poster in the APS Citation Poster session

The American magazine WIRED recently published an article on ‘quantum-safe public key encryption’.

Dutch newspaper NRC contacted four Dutch universities regarding the brain drain in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is going on in the Netherlands.

An extraordinary encounter took place in 1911. American scientists discovered the last 'wild' Indian, from the Yahi tribe, who had lived in total isolation for years. As he had no name, they called him Ishi. But who was this man, and what did this discovery mean to us? Cultural anthropologist Erik Bähre…

The climate crisis, the return of TB and the digitisation of cultural heritage. The Netherlands and Indonesia face many of the same challenges. A visit by a delegation from Leiden University to Indonesia at the end of June highlighted the benefits of cooperation.