More focus on diversity in Antiquity, workshops for students with disabilities, and a card game to share stories about diversity: these and other projects will receive funding from the JEDI Fund in 2023.

Connecting as the magic word. Seeking new collaborations, presenting ourselves to the outside world with an open attitude and showing what we do. During the opening of the academic year on Tuesday afternoon, Dean Jasper Knoester emphasised that change and connection are necessary for the university…

Three Leiden students will be sharing their knowledge of history while playing video games. The livestreams are part of the ‘Streaming the Past’ project and will be available on the popular streaming platform Twitch. The first livestream will be on Thursday 20 May.

Master's students Eden Dijkstra and Rosemary Snelth are the first winners of the H.S. Versnel Prize for best master's or research master's thesis in the field of ancient religion. According to the jury, their theses were so original, well-written and of such high quality that both deserved first pla…

Exhibition

Open Monumentendag

Je onderdompelen in de wereld van de lobby. Dat kan op donderdag 10 november tijdens de Nacht van de Lobbyist, een publiek event dat de Universiteit Leiden en de Public Affairs Academie voor de 2de keer organiseren. Vijf vragen aan initiatiefnemer Bert Fraussen, universitair docent bij het Instituut…

Academic ceremony

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Online, hybrid, on campus... It was an unpredictable year, also for the Faculty of Humanities. Luckily, there were also non-corona related stories. Let's review 2021 with this list of the most-read news articles per month.

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Discovering while still studying whether work in science might be for you. That is what students get during the faculty Research Traineeship Programme. On Friday 1 September, they presented their results to each other and their supervisors.

Translating texts, rehearsing scenes or practising music. Over the last few weeks, students of the BA Classics programme have been focused on just one thing: their production of the Greek tragedy Hecuba. Almost a third of them are involved in it. Iris de Smalen, who plays Hecuba, and Christoph Pieper,…

Two thousand years ago, the Middle East found itself caught between the rise of the Roman Empire in the west and the Parthian Empire in the east. PhD candidate Nolke Tasma has been awarded an NWO grant to investigate how local inhabitants experienced these changes.

Migrants are expensive. Or are they? Professor Olaf van Vliet collaborated on a big research project from Leiden University to map the costs of migration. During the last episode of this season of the podcast Open Geesten (Open Minds), he talks about the initial results. Do migrants really put a lot…

This year's London Hellenic Prize is awarded to Caroline Vout for her excellent study of representations of the human body in sculpture, Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body.

On 25 November, Professor Ineke Sluiter received the Medal of Honour for Arts and Sciences in the Order of Orange-Nassau. She was presented with the medal by King Willem-Alexander.

Psychologists Anna van ‘t Veer and Eiko Fried will start a scientific integrity workshop tour after the summer, called Responsible Scholarship: Psychology. Their aim: giving the subject a more prominent position in the academic’s mind.

Toen in 2019 honderden afvalcontainers in de Waddenzee vielen, wilde de overheid geen informatie vrijgeven over wat er in de containers zat. Vijf jaar later weten we eindelijk meer, nadat hoogleraar Esther Kentin beroep deed op de Wet Open Overheid.

Conference

The Faculty of Humanities’ On-Campus Master’s Experience Day was a pleasantly busy event. The information sessions and corresponding information market went down well with interested undergraduates.

What began as a PhD project has grown into a website with 120,000 unique visitors each year. With the platform OpenML, researcher Jan van Rijn is contributing to open science, aiming to make machine learning more transparent, accessible, and fair.

Like many others, Ruurd Halbertsma has had a rollercoaster of a year. His museum, the National Museum of Antiquities (RMO), was closed for a long while because of the lockdown. Visitor numbers picked up again from September, but it the next few weeks will be tense now the hospitals are full again. Halbertsma:…

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After the new government announced its plans to cut expenditure on academic education, the Faculty of Humanities launched the flash campaign ‘Stop the Catastrophic Cuts to Universities!’. Now academics across the university have been explaining why their discipline is needed.

Anke Smits and Lucien van Beek have been awarded a Praesidium Libertatis Grant this year. Smits is an assistant professor at the LUMC and Van Beek at the Faculty of Humanities. They each receive a sum of 75,000 euros from the Leiden University Fund (LUF).

Paul Gobée (LUMC), Kirsty Rolfe (Humanities) and Frank Takes (Science) have been nominated for the Leiden Teaching Prize 2023.

On Thursday, the 19th of March 2026, students and staff had the chance to partake in the second full-day workshop organized by the Leiden Center for the Study of Ancient Religions (L*CeSAR). This edition was centered on the role of the environment in relation to religion in antiquity.

What does it sound like when you create your own words in Chichewa? Can you decipher hieroglyphs after just one workshop? Visitors found answers to these and many other questions during the first edition of the Evening of Languages, held in the brand-new Herta Mohr Building. With a sold-out programme,…

More people seeking asylum, overcrowded asylum accommodation and asylum procedures that take years because of a lack of capacity. The current government wants to declare an asylum crisis but what is that exactly and can they just do that?

Professor Caroline Vout, Cambridge University, was awarded the Leiden University Byvanck Chair in 2020. In a pre-Covid-19 world, the Byvanck Chair would stay in Leiden for seminars, lectures, and research activities. Instead, the pandemic disrupted this schedule. Last month, Vout taught her masterclass…

Banquets for the rich, porridge for the poor and a standard diet of bread, olive oil and wine. Just a few assumptions about the Roman diet.

'Academics who share their knowledge with the outside world on social media are often insulted or even threatened. Especially female academics and academics of colour seem to regularly be the victim of sexist and racist comments.' This is what Ineke Sluiter, Professor of Greek Language and Literature…

World history is often framed in terms of flows of people and migration: humans coming ‘out of Africa’, the spread of farmers in the Holocene, Phoenician and Greek diasporas over the ancient Mediterranean, the colonization of the world by Europeans from the 16th century onwards. Together with his Exeter…

From March 27 to 31 Byvanck Professor Carrie Vout gave the intensive masterclass Classical Art - Definitions, Politics, Limits. This special lecture series was open to students and PhD candidates in Archaeology and Classics. One of the attendees, Nicky Schreuder, on the class: 'It was a critical and…

When are you (sexually) mature? A KNAW grant will enable associate professor Rafal Matuszewski to organise an interdisciplinary workshop on this question.

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.’

Leiden University has six top bachelor’s programmes, according to Keuzegids universiteiten 2024 consumer guide to universities published on 30 November 2023. This once again puts the university in third place among broad universities ranked according to top programmes.

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From sponsored runs to festivals and from open days to concerts: Leiden University hosts lots of events each year. We are highlighting six of them for 2023.