During the Dutch famine of 1944–45, people were much more creative in finding food than we thought. Biology student Tom Vorstenbosch discovered that people did not only eat flower bulbs at that time, but also radish leaves and wild plants such as sorrel and chickweed.

We talk too little about silence, thinks university lecturer Gerlov van Engelenhoven. He has been awarded a Veni grant to investigate the role of silence in protest movements. Does silence sometimes really say more than a thousand words?

If you do research on Leidens Ontzet in Leiden, you can count on a lot of interest. But Leiden Kennisstad interns Marieke Nolten and Alexander Nuijten had not expected there would be quite so much interest. They concluded a year of research with the presentation of a scientific paper.

For hundreds of years, children in Ancient Egypt learned to read using The Satire of the Trades, a text in which a father gives advice to his son through descriptions of different professions. PhD candidate Judith Jurjens investigated how this worked in practice.

The brains of adolescents react more responsively to receiving rewards. This can lead to risky behaviour, but, according to Leiden University research, it also has a positive function: it makes learning easier. Publication in Nature Communications.

It is true that girls perform better at school than boys, but this is not due to differences in brain development. This is the conclusion psychobiologist Lara Wierenga draws from a recent study. Publication in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

On Friday 9 December, Renate van der Zee and professor Marieke Liem held a lecture on 'Visible and invisible violence against women' at the Campus The Hague.

Project TARGET is a research project aimed at the relation between the illegal arms trade and firearm violence. In a study conducted in seven countries, the researchers took a look at the differences and similarities. Katharina Krüsselmann and Marieke Liem took a closer look at the situation in the…

How old is the phenomenon of states attempting to control migrations on external borders? What were the motives and outcomes of these policies? In his dissertation, Jovan Pešalj examines how migration control on the southern Habsburg border emerged, how they functioned, and what impact they had on migrations.…

Robot technology is flourishing in multiple sectors of society, from retail, health care, industry and education. However, are robots representative towards minority groups of society, like LGBTQ+ people?

Firearms and violence in Europe–A systematic review by Katharina Krüsselmann, Pauline Aarten, Marieke Liem

The Ecuadorian Pachakutik party is one of the oldest indigenous political movements in Latin America. Despite not being very successful at the polls and hardly having organisational resources at its disposal, Pachakutik is still part of Ecuador’s political landscape. In her dissertation, Political Scientist…

Your local city park may be improving your health, according to a new paper led by Leiden environmental scientist Roy Remme. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Remme and his colleagues describe how access to nature increases people’s physical activity—and therefore overall health—in…

At the VIth Monte Albán Round Table conference (July 2011) in Oaxaca, Mexico, Maarten Jansen (Leiden University) together with Mexican archaeologists Dante García and Iván Rivera (both from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) discussed the topography and toponyms of the archaeological…

Moot Court

Guest Lecture

Conference

Lecture

The number of victims of child abuse is estimated to be higher during the first lockdown compared with a period without a lockdown. This is mainly due to an increase in the number of victims of emotional neglect, including educational neglect and witnessing domestic abuse. Families with children about…

Leiden criminologists have co-developed an artificial intelligence technology that tracks firearms incidents by scanning over 350 news sources.

The sixth specialisation of the Master Crisis and Security Management (CSM) will start in September 2023: Governance of Violence. Coordinator of this track is Professor Marieke Liem. She talks about the how and why of this new track and the importance of research in and knowledge of the nature and scope…

Seminar series

'Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies', edited by Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters and Trevor Pinch, will be published by Routledge on November 18

On 17 October, a representative from the ERC Safe & Sound project attended the first edition of WE ROBOT Europe in Berlin. At the conference, speakers and participants from the academic world, policy bodies and industry shared and discussed their thoughts on robotics regulation in the EU and the US.…

The life and career of art historian and Leiden alumna Gerdien Verschoor (1963) followed quite a remarkable path before she was appointed director of Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre in 2019. A woman with a deep awareness of historical places, she sees it as more of a series of coincidences, but the…

Seminar series

Lecture, Research Seminar

This section provides an overview of online tools for the study of the medieval Low Countries. The websites linked down below are often times both available in Dutch and English.

Lecture, Leiden University Nationalism Network

Seminar series

Mini-symposium

Seminar series

'I belong here.' This is what the young Jewish law student Hetty Koster felt when she attended the memorable protest speech given by Professor Cleveringa on 26 November 1940. She managed to survive the war by going into hiding. She married Dolf Cohen, later Rector Magnificus of Leiden University, and…

Holocaust scholars Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski will jointly hold the Cleveringa lecture on November 26. They were accused of defamation in Poland for a book they co-edited. How has this affected them? ‘This is an attempt to wear us down.’

Various researchers from Leiden University have been awarded NWO (Dutch Research Council) Open Competition funding. Nine social sciences and humanities projects will receive the funding.

Inaugural lecture

Although it can be a challenge at times, parents should keep communicating with their teens. Also about how they parent. Research by developmental psychologist Loes Janssen shows that parenting can be perceived quite differently by family members and mood plays an important role. Parents often parent…

Lecture

Lecture

It may seem as though adolescents do as they please, but they are more sensitive to their parents’ opinions than they would appear. The adolescent brain reacts strongly to parental criticism or praise. These are the results of a study by an interdisciplinary research group of psychologists and neuroscientists…