Speakers from all over the world offered their interesting views on the relationship between humans and animals during the LUCAS Graduate Conference, based around the central theme ‘Animals: Theory, Practice, and Representation’.

Featuring the world’s first neural synthesizer, artist Guy Ben-Ary and his collaborators will perform at the TodaysArt Festival in The Hague on 21 September. For this performance, he collaborated with the lab of Erik Danen to transform neural stem cells into neural networks on a chip.

Freek Vonk and Mike Richardson, with many collaborators, have published two snake genomes in two parallel articles in the prestigious journal PNAS. Their new findings provide insight into the co-evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative law, travelled to São Paolo, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro from 14 to 18 March with a delegation from Leiden University with the aim of strengthening ties with Brazil. During the visit agreements were made on future academic collaboration and…

Is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adequate in ensuring responsible innovation using data analytics? What is the role of ethics with regard to placing limits on technological developments? Does innovation drive business and industry transformations, or does shareholder value maximization…

The fact that a significant number of seats in the Dutch provincial councils are now occupied by members of the Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging, BBB) who have an agricultural background need not lead to conflicts of interest when voting on, for example, nitrogen emissions. This is…

Despite a lack of specific legislation on this issue, Dutch Minister of Justice and Security Dilan Yeşilgöz is allowing the national police force to experiment with facial recognition technology.

Leiden University stands for high quality research. Integrity and reliability in the way we conduct research are core beliefs in Leiden.

While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is empty of essence (svabhava). How is constructive cultural…

Dementia is widely considered a progressive condition associated with changes in cognitive capacities, which promotes the idea that people with dementia need to anticipate end-of-life care preferences. There is a growing body of interventions meant to support advance care planning (ACP) for people with…

Links to related organisations, institutes, journals and archives.

The IEG specialisation integrates professionally-oriented activities in the curriculum to prepare students for the job market. For example a 2-day Challenge is organised each year during which you meet potential employers, learn practical skills and solve a policy, organisational or ethical issue.

Our department aims to educate academic professionals who are prepared for the future of law and organization.

It is difficult to deny the value and importance of human rights, and yet their application in the context of climate change is increasingly contested. While some argue that it is difficult to establish the violation of human rights by climate change processes, others contend that human rights are anthropocentric,…

NTER-SECTION is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on contributions from junior archaeological researchers at Leiden University. The journal offers an accessible platform for the publication of individual research by undergraduate and graduate students. The Editorial Board consists of PhD…

Jurisprudence is a philosophical introduction to the law. This subject is taught by the department of Jurisprudence.

The Clinical Psychology Unit is organized as follows:

In the wake of controversial disclosures of classified government information by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, questions about the democratic status of secret uses of political power are rarely far from the headlines. Despite an increase in initiatives aimed at enhancing government transparency – such…

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths?

This new volume, published 19 November 2020, - within the series 'Intersections' -, explores the concept of magnificence as a social construction in seventeenth-century Europe. Although this period is often described as the ‘Age of Magnificence’, thus far no attempts have been made to investigate how…

FAIR-ASSESS brings together researchers from five different Leiden faculties, as well as experts from outside the university. The project has been initiated by Andrei Poama and is being led by Josette Daemen.

Despite the fact that transnational movement and intercultural encounter are the signs of our present time, questions of belonging and legitimation of citizenship in most West-European countries still largely depend on monolingual norms and the problematic conflation of the idea of a national language…

We use laboratory animals to address research questions, but only when there is no alternative and the question cannot be answered in any other way. Read here why we conduct animals experiments.

Publications from the Project 0100 team members.

The corona crisis is also a disinformation crisis for the global community in general, and for the European Union (EU) in particular. What is less clear is how adequate the EU’s response to the ‘infodemic’ has been. This essay exposes the dangers of disinformation for the EU, which have intensified…

While self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems have received a great deal of attention in media and research, the general requirements of ethical life in today’s digitalizing reality have not been made sufficiently visible and evaluable.

Porosity between Politics and the Economy addresses the relationships between politics and the economy in deeply original ways. It is a book motivated by a sense of urgency aroused by both the failure of modern capitalism and the environmental crisis.

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

If you want to continue your academic education, the logical next step after obtaining your bachelor’s degree is to follow a master’s. You can do so in a university inside or outside the Netherlands, including several options right here at Leiden University!

Study information

Two of eLaw’s Advanced Masters students, Dimitra Laskari and Vasilis Xynoglas, presented their research on the Metaverse and Personal Digital Twins at the Neurocognition and the Reproduction of Space conference in Shanghai, China. The students presented on the rules for the Metaverse under the GDPR…

We would all like to live in a world in which individuals feel safe, conflicts are resolved peacefully and the interests of future generations are taken into consideration. At Leiden University legal scholars investigate to what extent public international law meets the needs of a globalised society.…

Demonstration experiments are a potentially powerful instrument to improve the micro-macro thinking of students in secondary education. Therefore we want to design a practical and generative approach to assist teachers to develop lessons with a demonstration experiment.

Chemotherapy that does nothing until you irradiate it with light. Sylvestre Bonnet receives a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros for the development of this treatment. The Leiden chemist wants to build a new molecule to fight tumours that are at the time still difficult to treat.

The Biological- and Soft-Matter Physics Master specialisation is one of the two programmes Leiden offers in experimental Physics. The programme can to a high degree be tailored to individual needs and interests.

More and more medicines are becoming available that target a tumour’s specific traits. The use of chemotherapy is continually undergoing improvement.

Combining different disciplines, researchers work together to formulate innovative solutions to societal problems.

Throughout all domains of life, from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, genomes adopt well-organized three-dimensional structures that can change in space and time to accommodate preferred transcriptional programs for environmental adaptation, the maintenance of cellular identity and differentiation…

The long term goal of the Biophysical Organic Chemistry/SSNMR group, headed by Prof. Huub de Groot, is to reach an understanding of structure, dynamics and functional mechanisms of membrane proteins and self-organized biological assemblies and to translate this knowledge into new concepts for nano-devices,…

The chemical industry must continue to innovate for a more sustainable, healthier society. The reseachers from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC) contribute by applying their knowledge to themes such as sustainability, energy and health.

In 2014 Hans-Martien ten Napel received a Research Fellowship in Legal Studies at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ. The book he wrote as a result of this fellowship was published last week by Routledge Law.

What is the best way for us as a society to deal with all the different forms of diversity? Professor Marlou Schrover will use the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) to explore this question with colleagues and the public.

If you have a plan that could improve the education or the learning environment of the Faculty of Humanities in terms of diversity or inclusion, you can apply for a grant from the faculty’s JEDI Fund. This year, Nasreen has been helping to develop a new syllabus for the first-year Ancient History co…

How can we tell whether and how a prehistoric weapon was used? How can we better understand the dexterity and combat skills involved in Bronze Age spear fighting? A research team from Leiden and Göttingen University present a new approach to answering these questions: they simulated the actual fight…

In this first ever podcast from LUCIS, hosts Yasmin Ismail & Sara Bolghiran explore what it means to imagine Muslim futures. Over 6 episodes we explore questions around what it means to imagine, the politics of imagination and what it would mean to engage with Muslims from the perspective of futures…

On this page you can find out more about applying for a PhD position at the Faculty of Humanities.

Inaugural lecture

Conference, Van willen naar zijn