Subproject of

Chinese materia medica (CMM), comprising a diverse array of natural substances from plants, animals, and minerals, has been integral to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) throughout history. This study investigates the dynamic evolution of CMM, noting shifts in species for improved therapeutic effects…

MPs in the Netherlands are first and foremost motivated by their direct environment, i.e. the parliamentary and partisan institutions.

Cynthia van Vonno, political scientist at Leiden University, explains why individual MPs vote according to the party group line.

In early modern Europe, as today, men and women with expertise in languages were indispensable to the functioning of societies and economies. The LangPro project will shed new light on these early modern language professionals and on the field that employed them: the language sector.

What was the social function of the colonial civil law courts in eighteenth-century coastal Sri Lanka? Why did people choose to have their disputes settled by Dutch law courts?

Intensive 5-day programme on the world-famous Antwerp-based printing and publishing house founded by Christopher Plantin in 1555. International experts will discuss how it developed the production and distribution of religious books and related illustrations and prints in the following centuries.

How can historically-informed performers step outside the confines of the work-concept?

The Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research has honored the application of Prof. Harry Fokkens for the research project entitled

Leiden professor Ineke Sluiter was appointed president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) on 1 June. She was presented with the gavel by her predecessor Wim van Saarloos.

A big performance by André Rieu, food trucks in The Hague and more contact with the Royal Family: grand plans were announced in April to make the State Opening of Parliament (Prinsjesdag) a real ‘crowd puller’. For this year, however, we will just have to make do with slight differences in emphasis.…

This page features an overview of relevant lectures, publications and conference papers.

Diversity Outdoors seeks to investigate how social inequalities are embodied through a comparative analysis of participation in outdoor recreation in Europe. We ask: What are the effects of ethnoracial embodiment on sociocultural diversity in outdoor recreation? How are bodies constituted as in or out…

The past decade, against the backdrop of a fragmented political landscape, has witnessed the greatest changes to the Netherlands since the aftermath of the Second World War. The labour market, the housing market, the energy market, the bank system, the pension system, the healthcare system, to name…

Archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois received an NWO Vidi grant to investigate the emergence of a pan-European culture in the third millennium BC. ‘We see ideas being shared across the entire continent in pre-literate societies. And not only that, for a thousand years, the same cultural ideas persist.’

Within the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FSW), D&I translates as the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and identities among both students and staff.

Historian Eric Storm of Leiden University discusses Donald Trump’s foreign policy in BBC Brasil.

Our team is committed to the study of knowledge in its broadest sense, encompassing both ideas and practices in all its historical variety. We look at what people regarded as knowledge, how they created, collected, circulated and used it, also why it mattered to them, and how all this was embedded in…

The project’s main aim was to build a reconstruction of a prehistoric house plan, without using any metal tools. How effective are tools made of stone, flint, bone, antler and wood? What are the constraints imposed by the various building materials? How much labour do we need and how much knowledge…

Which key factors contribute to effective land justice pathways for the protection of people’s land rights and prevention of conflict?

This Philosophy bachelor's programme offers perspectives from around the world. It will make you one of the next generation of students who will shape philosophy in the 21st century, ready to take on academic or professional challenges that call for critical thinking, analysis and argumentation skil…

The pews of the Walloon Church were filled on Friday 23 May, as more than 120 former students of the French Language and Culture programme gathered to attend mini-lectures, a short theatre performance, and a discussion about the state of the discipline.

This article investigates the efforts of influential Turkish Muslim civil society actors to amplify the voices of Muslim women in the Netherlands.

Colonial art and artefacts were not necessarily looted. Pieter ter Keurs, Professor of Museums, Collections and Society, calls for more nuance in the debate on art and collectors’ items from a loaded past. Inaugural speech on 2 December.

PhD defence

Every year The Young Academy (a sub-group of KNAW) nominates ten talented researchers to join their ranks. This year two of the nominees are from Leiden University: Quentin Bourgeois and Frans Snik.

How do democracies develop? The Institute for History is devoting a three-day conference to this question.

Over the past year, twelve articles by Leiden humanities scholars have been published on The Conversation, an English-language platform that translates science-related news for a broad audience. Read their articles here!

This book surveys a distinct human phenomenon in the history of the ancient Near East: individuals who were born males but, under various social and historical circumstances, their masculine identity was considered ambiguous. They bore specific titles and were engaged in cult or palace administration.…

Muslims have lived in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe for centuries. Their arrival in Western Europe, the two Americas and Australia is however relatively recent. Studying how Muslims relate to their Western environment (and vice versa) and the mutual influences of Western and Islamic philosophies…

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

Research in Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science focuses on the dynamics and the interaction of political institutions, individual decision-making, and collective behaviour.

This research cluster aims to analyse and interpret the formation and transmission of Graeco-Roman culture by exploring the relationships between cultural products (texts, objects, practices) and their societal and historical contexts.

Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past?

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

We live in a data-drenched society awash with numbers. An inhabitant of the democratic polis of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.) increasingly found himself surrounded by numerical data. This project aims to analyze the communicative functions and the political meaning(s) ascribed to these public…

By analysing neglected (continental) spy centres and integrating these groups of female intelligencers into the traditional, male-orientated historical narratives, this project will proceed towards a gendered history of early modern espionage.

Hekmat Dirbas defended his thesis on 14 February 2017

On the 16th of December, Ruixue Wu successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ruixue on this achievement!

On the 13th of February, Matthew Sung successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Matthew on this achievement!

Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

The Public Prosecutor's Office (OM) and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) want to use private DNA databases for genealogical research in criminal investigations. The method could be used in serious criminal cases that have stalled and it is already being used in investigations abroad. Whether…

On the 1st of December Marcela A. Garcia Probert successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.