Neanderthals and modern humans in Belgium, a bone story

The Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) record throughout Europe is characterized by major changes in human behaviour.

This dissertation examines how we can reconstruct physical activity by looking at variations in the shape of muscle attachment sites ( ‘entheses’) on the human skeleton. It evaluates two post-medieval contexts; rural Middenbeemster and urban Aalst.

The Altai region has yielded a cluster of Middle and Upper Paleolithic stratified sites that have been recently excavated using a multidisciplinary approach.

Language is a little bit like owning a mobile phone. We use it all the time, but we don’t really understand how it works. Where is language located in our brain? Do all humans have language? These and many other questions will be answered by professor Marc van Oostendorp in the MOOC Miracles of Human…

An international research team consisting of Katharina Riebel as leading PI and two international collaborators were awarded a Human Frontier Science Program grant for their proposal ‘Seeing voices’: the role of multimodal cues in vocal learning.

On Monday 9 May 2022, GTGC Visiting Researcher Derin Atiskan presented her work to the GTGC Global Justice and Human Rights and the GTGC Identity and Inequalities groups. The presentation was titled: "The Puzzle of International Norm Transfer: Exploration of Women’s Rights Recommendations Made through…

The Leiden University Centre for the Digital Humanities (LUCDH) invites applications from Leiden University staff and students for funding aimed at developing Digital Humanities activities.

Pop-up restaurant Happietaria has opened its doors in Leiden once again. Come and tuck in for charity between 4 February and 2 March. Students from Christian associations in Leiden will be preparing a delicious menu, and the proceeds will go to a charity that fights human trafficking in Southeast As…

Citizens underestimate their role, but they really can make a difference, says legal specialist Corinne Dettmeijer-Vermeulen. Combatting injustice is still the mission of this former National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking and Sexual Violence against Children. She will deliver the Cleveringa lecture…

Leiden researchers have developed a new method of determining the geographic origin of humans. Archaeologist Jason Laffoon and his team used the technique to discover where precolonial pioneers in the Caribbean region came from.

The genetic material of currently living Europeans is partly of Neandertal origin. Were our ancestors successful because they were hybridising and interacting with the local populations they encountered when migrating into new places? Reconstructing our evolutionary trajectory is key for rethinking…

This study stresses the importance of investigating vitamin D deficiency in every community to better understand the deteriorating effect that sociocultural practices may have had on health.

Carsten Stahn has just published Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities and Access to Culture. The book is part of the OUP Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Series.

Wednesday morning, the faculty was teeming with newly arrived international students, who will be starting their master’s programme or exchange programme next week. Over 150 students took part in the Introduction Morning of the Faculty of Humanities.

The Dutch scientists Quirine Eijkman and Jan-Peter Loof have been appointed vice-presidents in the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights.

We investigate bacteria and fungi to understand their malicious or beneficial impact on food crops and their pathogenic or antibiotic role in human health.

On 16-17 June 2022, Valentina Carraro presented a paper on ‘Overlapping Institutions in the United Nations human rights system’ at the Politicologenetmaal conference, Radboud University, Nijmegen.

On 24 February 2022, Melanie Fink from the Europe Institute at the Leiden Law School presented her research to the Global Justice and Human Rights thematic area during a research seminar.

Cisca Hoogendijk received an NWO Internationalisation in the Humanities Grant for the project 'Text in Context: Recontextualising the papyri from Roman Soknopaiou Nesos / Dime (Fayyum, Egypt)'.

Single-celled organisms have stiffer DNA than multicellular lifeforms like humans and rice. Theoretical physicists managed to simulate the folding in full genomes for the first time to reach this conclusion. Publication in Biophysical Journal on February 7.

On Tuesday 23 May 2017, Jasmina Mackic will defend her doctoral thesis ‘Proving discriminatory violence at the European Court of Human Rights’. The defence will start at 15.00 hrs, at the Academy Building of Leiden University, Rapenburg 73. The supervisor of the research is Vice Dean and Professor of…

Computers are increasingly able to accomplish tasks that are difficult for human experts, such as diagnosing diseases or detecting credit card fraud. While the earliest examples of computational thinking can be traced back to the 13th century, according to Holger Hoos, Leiden Professor of Machine Learning,…

From a catastrophic fire to a flood that engulfs the earth. Mineke Schipper, Professor Emeritus of Literary Studies, has collected myths from the four corners of the earth about the end of humanity. These have inspired 30 striking paintings by Japanese artist Yuriko Yamaguchi. The Dutch premiere of…

On Monday 9 October 2023, Jelena Belic, Matthew Canfield, Rachel Griffin, Henning Lahmann, and Barrie Sander presented their research on 'The Promise and Perils of Human Rights for Governing Digital Platforms' during a GTGC lunch seminar.

LUCL is pleased to announce that Bobby Ruijgrok has been awarded a PhD-position within the NWO PhDs in the Humanities Programme. His project is entitled 'Tapping into semantic recovery: an event-related potential study on the processing of gapping'. LUCL congratulates Bobby on this beautiful result.

Did you graduate at our faculty between 2016 and 2019? Please take part in the Humanities Job Market Survey!

Many thanks for visiting the Master’s Open Day on Friday 2 November! We hope that you enjoyed the day and that all your questions were answered.

Discovering effective new drugs is a long, expensive and uncertain process. Laura Heitman wants to improve this by finding out more about how drugs bind to proteins that play a role in disease. She calls it ‘drug discovery 3.0’. Inaugural lecture on 9 December.

A recent study on reintroduced tigers in Panna Tiger Reserve in India reveals that risks from tigers increased more because of human behaviour and people's livestock husbandry practices.

This liber amicorum is a tribute to Prof. dr. ir. Hans H. de Iongh, associate professsor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) of Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Antwerp, on the occasion of his retirement on 27 October 2016.

This thesis deals with the use of sound in interactions in the context of participatory systems and data sonification. We investigate an interactive environment where participants perceive information of the data through sound elements.

On Wednesday 5 October the Europa Institute hosts a special guest lecture by Human Rights Defender Mr. Rasul Jafarov from Azerbaijan.

During the next three years, 6 promising researchers from the Faculty of Humanities who have just been awarded their PhDs will be able to further develop their research ideas funded by a Veni grant from the NWO. A total of 147 Veni grants were awarded of which 14 went to researchers at Leiden Univer…

Titia Loenen, Mariana Gkliati, and Kristel Kruisbergen are involved in organising the PhD Training of the Netherlands Network for Human Rights Research (NNHRR). The annual training is hosted for the first time in Leiden and will take place on 7 and 8 June.

Starting 2 July 2022, a new exhibition will be opened to the public at the Old Observatory: More-than-Planet. This exhibit asks the question: how do we imagine our planet?

The central question of this thesis is: What drives late Middle Paleolithic stone artifact variability? In its attempt to answer this question, this thesis is a contribution to understanding variability within and between late Middle Paleolithic assemblages of the European Plain.

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…

In this provocative study, Shumon T. Hussain engages with the long-standing issue of French-Anglophone research conflicts in Palaeolithic archaeology.

The project aims to explore the history of the concept “barbarism” in Europe from the 18th century to the present. Responding to the contemporary popularity of the term “barbarism” in political rhetoric and the media, and the lack of reflection on the implications and legitimacy of its use, the project…

In store is now the Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law edited by prof. Janice Bellace of the University of Pennsylvania and ass. prof. Beryl ter Haar of Leiden University. The book is publisehd in Edward Elgars series on Human Rights.

This project investigates the causes of the major archaeological change in the period of 40.000-20.000 BC in South Africa.

Tan, former PhD candidate Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, received the award for the best dissertation with his thesis on armed conflict, international humanitarian law and human rights law.

The annual excursion of the Adv. LLM programme in European and International Human Rights Law (EIHRL) took place from Sunday 16 to Saturday 21 April.

Misha Plagis, assistant professor at the Grotius Centre of Public International Law wrote a paper together with Dr Nicole De Silva (Concordia University) entitled 'NGOs, international courts, and state backlash against human rights accountability: Evidence from NGO mobilization against Tanzania at the…

This article devises a framework to assess the degree to which human rights bodies provide duplicating or contradicting recommendations to States. Focusing on the case of torture, it creates an original database of recommendations delivered to 14 countries in the years 2012–2016. Results show that duplications…

The research contained in this dissertation explores the origins of fire making in prehistory, focusing primarily on the fire use practices and fire production capacities of Neandertals.