On 1 November 2018, Marieke Bloembergen was appointed Professor of Archival and Postcolonial Studies at the Institute for History.

Now available on YouTube!

In a letter initiated by Wil Roebroeks, among others, serious concerns were raised about three research papers claiming evidence for one of the earliest human occupations of Europe.

PhD defence

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

How can we make studying easier for students with a functional disability? This will be the key question during a public conference on 20 April. Romke Biagioni (Fenestra) explains why there is such a need for this conference. Are you going to be there?

How and to what extent the historic house (re-)constructs identity through image-making in China.

The ALMA Local Expertise Group (Allegro) is located in the Leiden Observatory (Sterrewacht). Professor Ewine van Dishoeck: ‘The Netherlands has played an important role in establishing ALMA. Thanks to this subsidy, we can now reap the scientific benefits.'

Two researchers at Leiden University who have recently received their doctorates have been awarded Rubicon grants to carry out research abroad. Both will be going to the US. one to conduct research on the spread of tumours and and the other to study nuclear fusion.

Researchers from Leiden University will develop a new approach to study the biomarkers of Alzeimer’s disease. This approach focusses on the molecular messengers of the cells. The project, led by Thomas Hankemeier and coordinated by Yuliya Shakalisava (Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research, LACDR),…

Henk Versnel's work on ancient religion has been seminal. For his 80th birthday, a group of scholars assembled to celebrate and analyze his oeuvre.

A selected group of unpublished amulets from various collections in the world will be studied and edited.

The figure of the barbarian has captivated the Western imagination from Greek antiquity to the present. Since the 1990s, the rhetoric of civilization versus barbarism has taken center stage in Western political rhetoric and the media. But how can the longevity and popularity of this opposition be accounted…

Subproject of the NWO Smart Culture Grant research project 'The Critical Visitor'.

Opportunities, challenges, and future perspectives of people-centered approaches in dynamic historic urban landscapes

New insights into the Fayum Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic.

In my research I am concerned with the possibility of a politics of sexuality without reverting to identitarian conceptions of sexuality. In a reading of the work of the American author James Purdy, I propose to move towards a politicizing of the concept of narrative identity as developed by the French…

Op maandag 1 april 2024 stierf onze leermeester, vriend en gewaardeerd collega Dr. Alexander Hendrik de Groot (Sander).

Ambroise Paré, Thomas Sydenham and Herman Boerhaave: all were great medical innovators in their time. We know far less about the 19th-century Russian physician and scientist Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. PhD candidate Inge Hendriks researched him in Dutch and Russian archives and collections. She discovered…

In the depots of the Faculty of Archaeology, many artifacts, accumulated after decades of fieldwork across the world, are stored. A new project, the Leiden Inventory Depot (LID), aims to unlock this wealth of information to the outside world. The 3D scanning of objects takes a central role in this endeavor.…

‘This lecturer’s aim is to challenge his students and to make sure that all of them understand the material,’ was the comment by Christel de Lange, chairman of the Leiden Student Council. Lecturer in Hebrew Studies, Martin Baasten, is the winner of the 2013 LSR Teaching Prize, the prize for the best…

Criminals? They are always men. At least, that’s what we tend to think. Historian Manon van der Heijden wants to show, however, that between 1600 and 1900 in Europe, women were responsible for a substantial share of the criminal activity. She has been granted a VICI award for her research.

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a major multidisciplinary research project which aims to re-vision the history of Asia in one of its most significant periods. The project is based at the British Museum, British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and…

Why are so many people killed on the Caribbean islands? And how can we reduce this number? Scientists aim to find answers to these questions by means of a databank. That could help justice and police on the islands to reduce the number of murders.

What is the effectiveness of two school-based skills-training programs in promoting mental health?

Around the sixth and seventh centuries, South and Southeast Asia saw a great religious change: Saivism largely took over from Vaisnavism. We’re going to look at the way in which Saivism, the religion of the god Siva, presented itself with respect to Vaisnavism. In particular we’ll investigate the role…

Settlement burials in the pagus Texandrië and the transformation of Merovingian society c. 700 AD (Southern Netherlands)

This book focuses on transnationalism as a key concept to evaluate how Europe responds to cross-border security challenges.

In this study I explore literary structures of identity-formation in the works of assimilated/acculturated Jewish writers: Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” (“Die Verwandlung”, 1912) and David Vogel’s Hebrew novel Married Life. 1929).

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM: Locating Responsibility for Forced Expatriate Labour Practices by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone.

How such did the traditional text of the Sinews Transformation Classic remain interesting to a changing readership?

My research addresses the function of the much-debated particle -nā in Biblical Hebrew, often translated with “please”, from the point of view of the most important ancient Bible translations (Greek, Syriac, Latin). It combines textual criticism, translation technique, discourse pragmatics, and the…

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

The project focuses on an intriguing aspect of André Chénier’s poetry, which has not received much attention in scholarship: Chénier’s indebtedness – in the form of translation, adaptation, borrowing, reference – to Hellenistic poetry; it interprets the role of this indebtedness in his poetical and…

The Ancient Worlds Network brings together staff and graduate students in LIAS working on the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

This paper explores the historicity of state and Buddhist accounts of the monk Xuanzang 玄奘 (602-664), arguing that in the reconstruction of Xuanzang’s life and career we ought to utilize the former to help adjudicate the latter.

Generations of Leiden students and academics have done archaeological research into the early medieval history of Oegstgeest. This makes this old settlement one of the best-documented sites from that era. In a new book, Leiden researchers take stock.

Interested in Area Studies? Then Leiden is the place to be! Join our Online Area Studies Week from 2-5 June to find out more. From Africa to Brasil and from Korea to Russia, Leiden covers all areas and fields, both in language, literature, history, politics and socio-economics. Join our live Q&As!

“BABYLON” investigates the extent of the similarities between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization and explores the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem.

There seem to be genes that influence how our brains develop over time. A large international consortium has discovered this with an extensive study. The results of the study were recently published in Nature Neuroscience.

The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The way of Intersectionality. This project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility within their organization, collection, and exhibition spaces that meets the breadth of demands placed by today’s “critical visitors.” Fifteen…

The Choose a Language Day was created to make high school students enthusiastic about choosing a linguistic profile and further education. Third-years were able to learn about different language studies at the Faculty of Humanities.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

Promotor: W. Jiskoot, Co-promotor: H.A. Every

The study ‘From Law to Practice: Towards a Roadmap to Strengthen Children’s Rights in the Era of Biomedicine’ written by experts from Leiden Law School and submitted to the Council of Europe’s Committee on Bioethics is now available online.

Prison and student life are worlds apart. But in the Learning Behind Bars project, Leiden criminology students get the chance to study inside prison walls with people incarcerated there.

Three Dutch research institutes - including the Leiden University’s KITLV - will conduct a follow-up study on the use of violence during the Dutch East Indies war of decolonisation (1945 – 1950). The government has designated 4.1 million Euros for this study.