Dr Gül Aktürk Hauser (Assistant Professor, Department of Heritage and Society, Faculty of Archaeology) and Dr Sophie Starrenburg (Assistant Professor, Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden Law School) organised a workshop titled ‘An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Heritage Reparations:…

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

A deliberate attack on a tangible element of a culture, such as a temple, is often also an attack on intangible elements: the religion or religious customs. Equally, the intangible can be attacked without the involvement of the tangible, for example the brutal curtailment of rights. How are these reflected…

Since the 1950s, the expenses in primary and higher education have grown towards each other. The costs per pupil in primary education rose, while the expenses decreased per student in scientific education. An article about this appeared in the NRC, with comments on the historical development of education…

Online Open Days are increasingly gaining popularity. On 13 September 2017, Dr. Erik de Maaker, Jule Forth and Tarini Shipurkar from the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology presented a webinar on their Master programme. The recorded webinar can be watched online.

How can we best protect cultural heritage in times of war? In an interview with LeidenGlobal, cultural heritage law specialist Evelien Campfens talks about her current research project on cultural heritage protection in Ukraine for the European Parliament (EP).

How did people across Central and Eastern Europe imagine the future during the transitions of the 1980s and 1990s? The umbrella term ‘post-communism’ does not provide an answer to this question. This project explores how writers and cultural theorists saw the potential future of their societies during…

This volume edited by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen aims to quantify and qualify cross-cultural global migrations and was published in the series 'Studies in Global Migration History'.

Marike Knoef has won an award on the 34th Award Ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC).

Andrea Giolai defended his thesis on 3 May 2017.

This project combines an extensive new open database on linguistic distributions, spatial modelling and areal linguistics in order to disentangle the roles of social and environmental factors on the emergence of linguistic diversity patterns of South America.

This project looks at the Ancient Greek language from the perspective of the ordinary writer. A large corpus of more than 60.000 Greek texts on papyrus, from private letters to petitions and contracts, offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-literary writers in…

This project aims to study the Aesopian fable from 1500 to the present day in its complex relationship between text, illustration and education, adopting a broad, transnational perspective.

How do inclusion and exclusion affect people?

What are the main issues leading to polarisation and division? What is the role of social exclusion in these processes? How can we inform and design better policies to safeguard young people from falling prey to intolerance and polarisation? The DRIVE project, led by Leiden University in The Hague,…

Skate legend Tony Hawk came to Antwerp. Belgium newspaper De Morgen published an article on the changing skate culture. Cultural Anthropologist Sander Hölsgens shines his light on this theme and talks about the democratisation of skate boarding, activism, public space and collective memory of skater…

Lecture, Byvanck Lecture

Sybille Lammes is leaving Warwick University in Britain to research digital culture in daily life at Leiden University. She will start as professor New Media and Digital Culture on September 1st 2017

On 8 December, Leiden University Press will present a new international series on Persian poetry and literature. The series will be edited by Asghar Seyed Gohrab (Middle Eastern Studies).

Digital edition of the correspondence between the philosopher Gerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus (Gerard) Bolland (1854-1922) and the philologist Pieter Jacob Cosijn (1840-1899), consisting of 46 letters covering the period 1879 to 1899.

Writing a story from the perspective of a Rwandan girl set in Africa is not an easy task. Alumna Cultural Anthropology Ruth Erica did it. Her debut novel The tree with the bitter leaves, in which an important supporting role is played by a student of cultural anthropology, appeared in August 2020.

Priya Swamy defended her thesis on 27 October 2016

This ethnographic research is a joint project with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, and KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. It aims to understand the experiences of social inclusion and exclusion of female migrants…

Utrecht University has a vacancy for a professor Middle Dutch literature and culture. Deadline for applications: 6 November 2021.

The 10th Experimental Archaeology Conference of EXARC took place in Leiden, Netherlands, over three days; 20th to the 22nd April 2017, in Leiden University’s Faculty of Archaeology. A conference report was published on the website of EXARC.

On 24 and 25 April 2025, the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam — home to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) — hosted an interdisciplinary workshop organized by dr. Rafal Matuszewski, an ancient historian at the Institute for History in Leiden.

Leiden University will be the stage of the annual award ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC) on 8 November. We answer the five key questions about these prestigious prizes.

The research project 'when patients don't want to know everything: guide and training for culturally sensitive information in palliative care' investigates how healthcare providers can offer inclusive palliative care.

Ornately decorated head pieces and jewellery, images of imposing mosques and photos of local people. The 'Splendours of the Silk Roads' exhibition depicts life and different cultures along this important trade route.

It is often claimed—in both scholarly and popular sources—that guide dogs for the blind are a modern innovation. But as this project demonstrates clearly, guide dogs also existed during the medieval period.

Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) and the Leiden University Institute for History (LUIH) are looking for a PhD in the History and Culture of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity.

This book is the first systematic analysis of the changes in the use of goods and services by households of Black South Africans since the early nineteenth century.

This book explores the reception of foreign news during the late sixteenth-century civil wars in France and the Netherlands.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective.

Leiden University will continue to offer its BA in Italian Language and Culture. The Board of the Faculty of Humanities has reversed its decision to stop admitting new students as of the 2026/2027 academic year.

Every month a member of the Institute for History tells about a book that inspired him or her. Afterwards, the pen is passed on to another colleague. This month dr. Meike de Goede tells about the book 'Between Tides' by Valentin Mudimbe. The novel, little known beyond the circles of Africanists and…

The war in Ukraine is leading not only to human suffering. Ukraine's cultural heritage is also experiencing the consequences of the war: museums are being bombed and 'Russification' in the occupied territories means children no longer learn Ukrainian. Researcher Evelien Campfens was commissioned by…

Tahir Abbas, Professor of Radicalisation Studies at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, is organising a book launch for his new book: 'Ruminations: Framing a sense of self and coming to terms with the other'. The book launch will take place on Thursday 15 December from 16.00-17.00 hrs. at…

Filipino anthropologists Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio and Myfel D. Paluga look back at the groundbreaking Netflix show Trese and what it missed about the stories of Indigenous peoples. They published the article 'What Netflix Got Wrong About Indigenous Storytelling' in the digital Anthropology magazine…

On 20 November 2020, Darinka Piqani spoke at the (online) kick-off event of the project 'Bridging the gap between formal processes and informal practices that shape judicial culture in the Western Balkans'.

The three-day conference will be held at the Ministry of Antiquities in Cairo from the 29th of September until the 1st of October 2019 with the title: The Walking Dead II: The Making of a Cultural Geography. It is organized by the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (RMO) and Leiden University.

How do speakers adapt to multilingual contexts?