The solar system was formed approximately 4.56 billion years ago. Despite the numerous theories that have been developed over the years, the formation and evolution of the solar system still remain unclear.

The Astronomy and Data Science master’s specialisation at Leiden University combines advanced Astronomy courses with relevant courses from the Computer Science programme at Leiden University.

This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people’s everyday lives.

Religious Studies at Leiden University allows you to study a broad spectrum of religions and their manifestations.

At Leiden Observatory, researchers investigate the origin of stars and their planetary systems. They detect and characterize planets around other stars (exoplanets). They study how stars and planets form. And they follow molecules from interstellar clouds to nascent planet systems. This way they address…

The radio telescope LOFAR, with a major contribution from Leiden Observatory, has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made. Never before have so many cosmic radio sources been captured in a single survey: 13.7 million.

Managing Diversity: Supervising Functions in Managing Colonial Workplaces

How do religious narratives persuade their readers to believe their message? And how can it be that some readers even come to treat fantasy and science fiction as authoritative religious texts? These are the core questions treated in Markus Davidsen’s new book Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance…

LUCSoR faculty work closely together with societal partners on issues related to religious education and religion in society.

On 25 October 2018, Tu Zhang defended her thesis 'Public Reason Secularism: A Defense of Liberal Democracy'. The doctoral research was supervised by prof. P. Cliteur.

Resilient Diversity: the Governance of Racial and Religious Plurality in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800

The directorate of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has two new members. Ronald Stark (currently at NWO) will be the new Executive Director of NOVA from 1 September. Amina Helmi (Professor of Dynamics, structure and formation of the Milky Way at the University of Groningen) will…

From the Big Bang to superconductivity. Many ground-breaking discoveries have been made in Leiden University’s long history.

On the 17th of June Rea Matsangou successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The Supplementa series of BABESCH is designed as a platform for thematic publications, in juxtaposition to the annual and varied mix of contributions offered by the journal itself. The thematic publications will include proceedings of colloquia, collections of particular studies by one or more authors,…

The Centre is the proud home of several research programmes.

What moves an individual, a society or a culture? How does religion relate to politics, economics and morals? Religion is everywhere and often plays, unnoticed, a large role in the daily lives of yourself and others.

This thesis is about cosmological inflation and its relation to observations.

The Sun and all the stars in the night sky reside in the Milky Way galaxy. In the at-rest reference frame of the Galaxy, typical stars travel with velocities of about 100-200 kilometres per second.

This historical study argues that the Mandaean religion originated under Sasanid rule in the fifth century, not earlier as has been widely accepted. It analyzes primary sources in Syriac, Mandaic, and Arabic to clarify the early history of Mandaeism.

On Tuesday 11 June 2024 Olivia Ramble successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

In this article, published in Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia Online, Erik de Maaker posed three questions. How can the persistence of the community religion, albeit marginalized, be explained? What role is left for the practices, objects, and beliefs associated…

On the 16th of June Patrtick Harrison successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

On 30 November, Florian Theissen defended the thesis 'Sincerely believing in freedom: a reconstruction and comparison of the interpretation of the freedom of religion and belief on the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights'. The doctoral…

LUCIS funded several research programmes to boost interfaculty and interdisciplinary cooperation and to widen the involvement of LUCIS members.

There is a new KABK Research Group!

LUCIS is an interfaculty knowledge centre offering a multidisciplinary and comparative view on Islam and Muslim societies.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration receives the 2021 Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award. In April 2019, the EHT team presented the first-ever photograph of the shadow of a black hole. Leiden professor Huib-Jan van de Langevelde has been director of EHT since last year. Three…

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

The role of religion in the identity construction of LGBTQIA+ folks

LIAS has a School of Asian Studies (SAS), a School of Middle-Eastern Studies (SMES) and a School of Religious Studies (LUCSoR). These designations, and the fields within them, remain foundational to our work. At the same time, the academic community benefits from the presence of cross-regional networks…

On 30 November 2023, Florian Theissen successfully defended his PhD thesis, 'Sincerely Believing in Freedom'.

Southeast Asia is a term to denote a collection of at present eleven nation-states with an enormous diversity in languages, cultures and religions. Muslims can both take a majority and a minority position.

The P.J. Cosijn Research Fellowship is an initiative to give promising Research MA students of Leiden University with an interest in Anglo-Saxon Studies the opportunity to conduct research on Old English language and literature. The Cosijn Fellowships are part of the ERC-funded project ‘Early Medieval…

In this thesis we use state-of-the-art observations and simulations to provide the best constraints to date on the HVS ejection rate and constraints on the stellar content and dynamics at the GC, including the progenitor binary populations and their star formation history.

In a virtual game environment, one of the positive effects of anonymity is the absence of one's prejudice toward others, which can give a person the freedom to change and experiment (Bartle, 2003). This project will adopt anonymity to be added to online cross-cultural collaborative learning in higher…

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

Smart algorithms and powerful processors are just as essential for astronomy as big telescopes. Astronomers at Leiden University therefore constantly operate at the interface between astronomy and data science.

The Secular Outlook describes what moral and political secularism means. It paints the image of a world view in which state and religion are kept well separated.

Streptomyces are filamentous bacteria that produce more than two-thirds of known antibiotics.