From Persia and Arabia to North Africa: as early as the nineteenth century, there were Dutch people who used the camera themselves in various regions of the Middle East.

How do we account for historical power dynamics when writing new histories of slavery and emancipation? What critical methods can we employ when studying preserved archives and collections? A new book series aims to address these questions. The initiators Karwan Fatah-Black and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms…

The annual commemoration of the nation’s war dead on Dam Square and at Waalsdorpervlakte, the Dutch apologies for historical slavery and the Cleveringa Lecture itself: our relationship with history is often ritualistic, Cleveringa Professor Frank van Vree will say in his inaugural lecture on 27 Nove…

The Netherlands has gained a third commentary on the Constitution – with Leiden as its home base. The first copy of Een nieuw commentaar op de Grondwet (A new commentary on the Constitution) (published by Boom Amsterdam) was presented to Prime Minister Mark Rutte in the Torentje last week.

PhD defence

Not passed your Dutch exam? Then there’s no HAVO (Higher General Secondary) or VWO (pre-university) diploma for you, says the Inspectorate of Education's Inspector General. This comment fuels a discussion on an exam that is already under fire. The final exam for Dutch is said to be uninspiring, too…

On Friday 9 December, Renate van der Zee and professor Marieke Liem held a lecture on 'Visible and invisible violence against women' at the Campus The Hague.

A fresh semester means a fresh faculty calendar. There is plenty to do at the faculty again in the coming months. Five interesting activities are listed below.

During the two-year History Research Master's programme you will learn from inspired academics and learn how to conduct high quality research.

Cities across the world display territorial struggles that in many cases involve violence and religious thought and practice. In Rio de Janeiro Brazil, the emergence of armed urban gangs that identify as evangelical/Pentecostal in a nation-state that was once considered the largest Roman Catholic nation…

Three years ago, Associate Professor Alicia Schrikker published 'De vlinders van Boven-Digoel', in which she chronicled several stories about colonial life in present-day Indonesia. Now there is a translation, by Rianti Manullang, who is also an assistant professor at Universitas Indonesia and doing…

Pope Francis has appointed astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. She joins an illustrious list of Nobel Prize winners, such as Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger. What is her view on this? An interview with our professor of Molecular astrop…

On Tuesday 12 April Angus Mol and Aris Politopoulos have been awarded the fourth LUCAS Publieksprijs.

How can we best tell the current generations about some of the darkest parts of our past? To answer this question, researchers from Leiden are working with the Gedeeld Verleden, Gezamenlijke Toekomst foundation on public programmes about the Dutch history of slavery.

Junk news sites with unknown names such as Trendnieuws and Viraal Vandaag reach millions of Dutch people thanks to their Facebook pages. Messages from those pages are much more often shared and liked than messages from pages from well-known news media such as De Telegraaf, NOS and NU.nl. This is shown…

The ISSC's ICT helpdesk receives dozens of questions from staff and students every day. A collaboration between TNO, LUCL and the ISSC aims to determine whether a specially designed chatbot could provide support in this area.

Prof.dr. M.L.J.C. Schrover Prof.dr. A. Schmidt Summary See Dutch site.

PhD defence

PhD defence

Valedictory lecture

Prof.dr. S. van den Bogaert Prof.dr. P. van Cleynenbreugel

Over hundreds of thousands of years, our region witnessed the comings and goings of various types of hominin. This depended on the temperature as ice ages alternated with warmer periods. In ‘De eerste mensen in de Lage Landen’ (‘The First Humans in the Low Countries’) Leiden archaeologists Yannick Raczynski-Henk…

The BLRN members have published extensively in recent years. In addition to the BLRN book series, dissertations of BLRN members published in the E.M. Meijers Institute Series, you will find below a selection of our publications. For a more complete overview of publications of each BLRN member, please…

Little is known about the function of the particle de as a sentence-final particle (SFP; as opposed to its relativizer/nominalizer function) in Mandarin Chinese, as in zhe gongzuo henshihe ni DE ‘Actually, this job is very suitable to you’. In this talk, I will present a syntactic and semantic analysis…

The nominees for the IRO Thesis Prize 2024 and the Prof. Dr. J.Th.J. van den Berg-prijs 2024. Who authored the best thesis in Leiden University’s bachelor’s programme in Political Science?

In this work I investigate the post-verbal modal marker DE in Sichuanese (a southwestern Mandarin variety), which, at a first sight, seems to be highly ambiguous among various root modal readings when appearing in the [V-DE] construction (see (1)). Based on a recent fieldwork on Sichuanese, I will show…

It was not light, but its absence that caught Stephanie Noach's attention a few years ago. With her research on darkness in art, she aims to show how darkness can question and sometimes even undermine colonial imagery.

Op dinsdag 4 februari 2020 kreeg universitair docent kinderrechten Stephanie Rap de KNAW Early Career Award 2019 uitgereikt. Ze kreeg de prijs voor haar onderzoek naar de betekenis van internationale kinderrechten.

Met de val van Balkenende IV laait de discussie over het functioneren van politieke partijen binnen ons democratisch bestel weer op. Opgeblazen ego’s, overambitieuze politici en partijpolitieke machtspelletjes zouden echte democratie in de weg staan. Maar die discussie is niet nieuw.

Laura van Broekhoven always knew she wanted to study archaeology, and that’s exactly what she did. Now this Leiden alumna is director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the four museums of the University of Oxford.

For hundreds of years, children in Ancient Egypt learned to read using The Satire of the Trades, a text in which a father gives advice to his son through descriptions of different professions. PhD candidate Judith Jurjens investigated how this worked in practice.

Inaugural lecture

An overview of the media appearances of scientists working with the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs about terrorist attacks in Europe, their consequences, and more.

The LUCAS Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Dr. Renske Janssen for her PhD thesis Religio Illicita? Roman Legal Interactions with Early Christianity in Context.

Our solar system probably evolved in the same way as most of the other planetary systems around us. This has been shown by German-Austrian-Dutch research on more than 870 planet-forming disks in the Orion cloud A. The five researchers, including three from the Leiden Observatory, published their findings…

An international team of researchers led by Alice Booth (Leiden University, the Netherlands) have discovered methanol in the warm part of a planet-forming disk. The methanol cannot have been produced there and must have originated in the cold gas clouds from which the star and the disk formed. Thus,…

In gesprek met Woopke Hoekstra

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Debate, College Tour de podcast

Inaugural lecture

PhD defence

Humans seem to regard robots as social actors, they show empathy and altruism toward them and are concerned for their wellbeing. But why exactly would this be the case? One hypothesis is confusion: we don’t know exactly what they are, so we treat them as humans as a cognitive heuristic. Another…

Three Leiden researchers will each receive a Vici grant of 1.5m euros. They are historian Cátia Antunes, cell biologist Dennis Claessen and archaeologist Marie Soressi. This grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) will give them the opportunity to form their own research group over the next five…