New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 words ago were less traditional than was thought. The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Archol, the National Museum…

Black-and-white photographs filled with solemn young men and distinguished professors line the walls of the Grand Auditorium. Young women are missing from the photos; women rarely obtained PhDs 50 years ago. And this article is about that group, the PhD candidates between 1966 and 1972, who were invited…

In a new article in the journal Scientific Reports, Leiden archaeologist Wei Chu and colleagues report on recent excavations in Western Romania at the site of Româneşti, one of the most important sites in southeastern Europe associated with the earliest Homo sapiens. The site gives an important glimpse…

From Tuesday 6 January till Tuesday 15 January 2026, NVIC organizes a new edition of the TAFL course. This intensive, interactive course is developed for (future) teachers of Arabic. It addresses both the practical aspects of teaching Arabic as a foreign language as well as the underlying linguistic…

Children who lost their fathers in early modern England ran the risk of being sold to the highest bidder. Although Shakespeare wrote about it in his plays, the practice disappeared from collective memory for a long time. University lecturer Lotte Fikkers is bringing it back to light in a new Vidi research…

Radboud University is looking for a PhD researcher who will investigate the afterlife of medieval thought in early modern Europe through the study of concrete instances of intellectual transfer, for instance the appropriation of specific medieval authors or early modern revaluations of specific themes…

“Courses” offers interested scholars and students open-access course material which can be used in class.

The CNaVT exam is the official, international exam of Dutch as a Foreign Language for all who learn Dutch all over the world. The Catholic University of Leuven organizes the exam. The Dutch Language Union has commissioned this collaboration.

The central aim is examining gender differences in recorded crime, particularly in relation to interpersonal violence, in early modern Bologna.

How did nineteenth century scholars evaluate each other and each other’s work through more or less informal practices of peer review?

Keeping and breeding of test animals for the purpose of scientific research and education.

Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe

As a critical commemoration of its centenary, this book presents a mosaic of one hundred carefully curated fragments by expert authors, shedding light on politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts in a hundred years of Turkey.

Sonic Modernities situates Southeast Asian popular music in specific socio-historical settings, hoping that a focus on popular culture and history may shed light on how some people in a particular part of the world have been witnessing the emergence of all things modern.

Recently Cambridge University Press published dr. Jan Osters monograph “Media Freedom as a Fundamental Right”.

What is the role of memory in contemporary music?

The Historia Naturalis Brasiliae Reconsidered

Individual traders should be at the forefront of the study of early modern world trade rather than institutions such as states and companies, argues Professor of Global Economic Networks Cátia Antunes. Inaugural lecture on 9 June.

The Patriot behind the pot tells the story of pottery, people and politics in the Netherlands during a time of great revolutions -revolutions both in a political and industrial sense.

The two-years master's programme ICT in Business and the Public Sector (last intake in February 2025) at Leiden University provides students with a deeper understanding on our thinking on physical, geographical and industry boundaries, on distance, speed and communication. The programme offers two specialisations:…

This dissertation reports on the requirements for the design and development of teacher assessments, and examines the possibility of developing an assessment procedure that complies with the formulated requirements.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded a grant of 750,000 euros to the 'Visualising the Unknown in 17th-century Science and Society' project. Researchers will reconstruct how seventeenth-century scientists recorded and shared their groundbreaking microscopic discoveries. We…

Recently, Hans-Martien ten Napel was in the news on the above subject several times.

The deadline for the conference "The Fantastic and the Supernatural in the Medieval Germanic Traditions" has been extended to June 30.

The Modern Migration Policy Act aims to ensure that the admission of regular migrants is effective and manageable.

On 5 September 2017, Alessandro Tonutti defended his PhD dissertation

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

The presents thesis investigates the extent to which Chinese, Dutch and American speakers of English are mutually intelligible. Intelligibility of vowels, simplex consonants and consonant clusters was tested in meaningless sound sequences, as well as in words in meaningless and meaningful short sent…

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Neanderthals were able to make fire on a large scale with the aid of pyrite and hand-axes. This means they could decide when and where they wanted fire and were not dependent on natural fire, as was thought earlier. Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen has discovered the first material evidence for this. Publication…