Can humans sense where north is, using what is known as magnetoreception? This question had master’s student Björn Keyser (Media Technology) so intrigued that he started crowdfunding to be able to study this together with the California Institute of Technology.

In the academic year 2018 - 2019, the Faculty of Humanities established the Educational Innovation Programme. In this way, the faculty wants to realise the ambitions from the educational vision of Leiden University in education. How is the programme currently doing? We talked to project manager Sanne…

Mayor Peter Heijkoop is busy getting to know his city better. On Monday 7 July, he visited the Faculty of Humanities. ‘A few hours and you can see how important this is.’

LUNHA strives to redefine global health by prioritizing justice, fairness, and inclusion in Africa. Through collaboration with diverse stakeholders, LUNHA aims to reshape global health research and foster a broader engagement with social sciences and humanities.

The history of the LGTBI+ collective, deeply marked by episodes of violence, repression, and discrimination, is also the history of the struggle for social change and the conquest of civil rights, advances without which contemporary Western democracies could not be explained. More recently, the implementation…

Every year, an NWO PhD in the Humanities grant is awarded to a prospective PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology. This year, the grant went to Maia Casna, enabling her to study respiratory disease in the past. ‘My hypothesis is that the rapid formation of cities in the medieval Netherlands, must…

Leiden University has a new professor. On 1 June Nadine Akkerman became Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, a position she feels is designed to help her help others.

On 3 July, students of the Leiden Leadership Programme received their certificates in the Marekerk church in Leiden. During the festive closing ceremony, it became clear that humanity and leadership go hand in hand. ‘As a leader, you have to listen, observe and acknowledge problems.’

By means of a presentation, a panel discussion, and activities in the fresh air, the event themed ‘Environmental Humanities’, organised by the Honours College Humanities, managed to unite both people and disciplines. ‘There is a gap between humanities and sciences, but they are more alike than you might…

Humans and bonobos show striking similarities as well as differences when they see pictures of conspecifics. Both are more interested in photos of conspecifics that show emotion. But while our human attention is more easily drawn to photos of family members and friends that express certain emotions,…

How does digitalisation affect the humanities? The introductory course for the Honours College Humanities Lab challenges students to reflect on this through the production of their very own short film.

Economic law, environmental law and human rights are important fields of law for sustainable development. But they do not interact sufficiently, which makes it difficult to implement sustainable development.

Organisation

University lecturer Laurie Cosmo, having grown up in New York, came to the Hague from Rome, Italy, where she fell under the spell of the Kunstmuseum. ‘I loved the building even before I worked at Leiden University.’

Ever since Nadine Akkerman, Professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture, came across a woman spy in her research, secret agents have kept cropping up in her work. Now there’s Spycraft, a popular history book exploring the espionage techniques used by early modern spies, which she has co-written with…

Leiden University's humanities have one of the top places in the Times Higher Education Rankings. This year, we were placed 26th.

How unique is the human capacity for learning and adapting to an environment? In field research – in the rainforest and Artis Zoo – primatologist Karline Janmaat is studying how humans and other primates adapt to their environment in their search for food. She will give her inaugural lecture as Professor…

In recent months, a number of academics, a sounding board group and the relevant directors of education, in collaboration with Campus The Hague, have been working on the development of a new Master’s programme: Environmental Humanities. With this programme, we aimed to offer a new and necessary perspective…

There was a lot of interest. In front of nearly a hundred researchers, supporting colleagues and Martijn Ridderbos, the Vice-Chairman of the Executive Board, Lotte van Dillen, Research Director of Psychology and Saskia Goedhard, Director of Humanities Operations jointly opened the new lab with a classic…

An international team of researchers led by Leiden archaeology professor Marie Soressi and Leipzig senior geneticist Matthias Meyer has recovered the DNA of a woman belonging to an Ancient North Eurasian population from a 20,000-year-old pendant. This is the first time DNA analysis has been used to…

The volume, Heritage Destruction, Human Rights and International Law, co-edited by Grotius Centre, Associate Professor Joe Powderly, and Dr Amy Strecker (Associate Professor, UCD), has been published by Brill/Nijhoff.

The university is committed to providing an accessible learning and working environment for students and staff. They should be able to feel at home at our faculty. That is why there is now an all-gender toilet in every humanities building to contribute to that feeling of recognition and safety.

External PhD Candidate Liselore Tissen was interviewed by Leiden Global about her work, in which she uses 3D printing. Recently she made a copy of a decorative human skill this way.

Buried beneath a Suffolk forest, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known human-made fire. A fire that was sparked 400,000 years ago. This stunning UK discovery may rewrite our evolutionary story, potentially pushing fire-making back by more than 350,000 years.

Since the publication of the article in the interdisciplinary journal Nature, over 200 news outlets have showcased the pioneering research.

On June 30, eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies of Leiden University organised the annual Hans Franken Lecture. This year the lecture was delivered by Jan Kleijssen, former Human Rights Director at the Council of Europe.

In 2024, Professor Joanita Vroom received a substantial grant from the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) in support for her Hinterlands of Medieval Chalcis Project (HMC Project) in Greece. PHI, a California-based non-profit organization, is dedicated to archaeological research as well as to the preservation…

What do ten-year-old children and chatbots have in common? PhD researcher Bram van Dijk studied language development in both children and AI language models. ‘It’s actually quite practical that we attribute human traits to a chatbot.’

In zoos, at festivals and in a mobile lab at the market: everywhere, Mariska Kret tries to understand human and animal emotions with her distinctive behavioural research. Now she has received the Mercator Sapiens Stimulus of €1 million for her efforts.