Sara Petrollino, a university lecturer in linguistics, strongly believes that language influences the way we see the world. An NWO Open Competition (XS) grant will enable her to test this hypothesis among the Ethiopian Hamar people. ‘The idea that everyone thinks in geometric shapes is culturally de…

What socio-cultural transformations did indigenous communities in the Lesser Antilles undergo from the late precolonial to the early colonial period in response to Amerindian­ European-African cultural encounters? How did Amerindian populations realign themselves in response to the colonisation…

The students of European Union Studies visited Brussels this October, and it was another successful and worthwhile trip for those students in the MA International Relations programme.

This project investigates properties of quantity expressions across languages from the perspective of how quantity is represented in the human brain.

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

A more inclusive and diverse society is what Talisha Schilder, Hawra Nissi and Chiraz Hassoumi spend many hours a week working towards. Their hard work led them to being nominated for the ECHO Award.

Examining cybercrime from criminological, legal, administrative, and technical perspectives. The new Bachelor's programme in Cybersecurity & Cybercrime addresses the growing demand for versatile cyber professionals..

Scientists widely agree that we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. Environmental scientist Laura Scherer investigates how we should change lifestyles to achieve this temperature goal. Her research is part of the 4.8-million-euro Horizon 2020 project…

This research project from Leiden University looks at the opportunities and threats that flow from the existence of institutional and normative diversity in the area of fundamental rights for the effective protection of those rights in a pluralist world.

September 2022 marks the tenth anniversary of International Studies bachelor's programme. Some (former) staff members tell us what they think makes the Faculty of Humanities' largest programme so special.

Graduation MIRD Class of 2024: 'The world is better off with students like this'

The CARICOM-MERCOSUR Chamber has confirmed its participation at the ‘Trade Beyond COVID-19: Building Resilience’, a public seminar organized by the World Trade Organization.

Explore how skateboarding functions as a prefigurative learning tool in 'Skate/worlds.' This volume examines skateboarding's therapeutic potential, its role in queering and decolonizing education, and its impact on parenting and care work through perspectives from writers, educators, and activists.

This collection of essays explores processes of innovation in Greco-Roman technology and science.

We are living in an information era where the amount of image and video data increases exponentially.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another.

How do you make niche subjects interesting and accessible? Benjamin Suchard, historical linguist and researcher, seems to have created the perfect recipe, which consists of his various projects alongside his regular research, including a Twitter account and a major international film.

People suffer from anxiety wait on average twelve years before seeking professional help. That’s a pity and it’s unnecessary, says development psychologist Leonie Vreeke. She is therefore developing prevention programmes where parents learn to react in a helpful way to anxious behaviour on the part…

Promotor: Prof.dr. I.A.G. Snellen, C.U. Keller

On 5 September, spaceEU was launched at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, one of the world’s largest science, technology and media art festivals. This 1 million euro European-funded project is coordinated by Leiden Observatory. SpaceEU fosters a young, creative and inclusive European space community…

How did people move and form communities when human societies first shifted from hunting and gathering to farming? A new study of the Neolithic period in southwest Asia, the birthplace of agriculture, offers fresh insights.

ACPA alumni Ilya Ziblat Shay recently published the audio essay, A Fundamental Mode Of Being in the World: Improvisatory Paths as a Principle Creative Paradigm.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Conference, workshop

The main objective of the Telders Competition is to challenge students to excel in international law, consequently testing their creativity and powers of persuasion orally and in writing in a friendly competition.

NTER-SECTION is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on contributions from junior archaeological researchers at Leiden University. The journal offers an accessible platform for the publication of individual research by undergraduate and graduate students. The Editorial Board consists of PhD…

Lecture, Workshop

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

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

The role of religion in the identity construction of LGBTQIA+ folks

For a long time, bird song was considered as a typical male trait. But over the last twenty years, research has shown that a lot of female songbirds sing as well. Female scientists turned out to be the key factor in these findings, amongst others from the Institute of Biology Leiden.

Manuscripts that look like a comic book, that's how you could describe the manuscripts of the Dongba people from China. The manuscripts are one of the last examples of a so-called pictographic script that can only be interpreted by Dongba priests, shamans, who have knowledge of the ancient Dongba cu…

Abeer Abazeed, PhD-student at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, will defend her thesis on Wednesday april 21st. Four questions about her PhD-research ‘Is it One Nile? Civic engagement and hydropolitics in the Eastern Nile Basin’.

On 22 August was the start of the HOPweek, the introduction week for first year students studying at Campus The Hague of Leiden University. First year students were assigned to their own group with their own mentors. During this week the students could do fun activities and workshops where they got…

Is our musicality unique? To find out, the Bird Singalong Project brings together singing parrots from all over the world. Do you have a parrot that sings or whistles along to songs and would you like to help us? Sing up now!

Material Crossovers

Zār jewellery from Egypt can be found in many museums and private collections in the West, but for a long time very little was known about it, except that it was used in rituals to protect against spirit possession. PhD candidate Sigrid van Roode has explored its history and discovered that the jewellery…

A linguistic reconstruction of the migration of the Tocharians from Europe to China

The World Politics Major at Leiden University College The Hague examines the big ideas and the powerful forces – political, military, economic, social and cultural – that shape the world at every level, from the global to the local and everything in between. Political conflict is a key driver of many…

Who is Economic Man? Every economic paradigm presupposes an anthropology, a theory of human nature. This project explores the anthropologies presupposed and produced by ancient Greek economic texts, and the specific knowledge forms that shape these anthropologies.

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

1000 Years of World History in 100 Old Maps.

PhD defence

What’s really happening in the space between the cells in your body? With the Collagen Canvas project, students from Leiden University invite you to explore this question by blending science with art. This interactive artwork immerses you in the dynamics of the extracellular matrix—the invisible structure…

WORLDING AMERICA researches how ‘play’ has been a key force in the past and present process of creating America as a coherent and hegemonic ‘world,’ from 1503 to the present. ‘Play’ is an activity linked to change, serious even when frivolous, potentially transgressive even when rule-bound. Play intersects…

79 students, 15 organisations, and 16 projects: within the master’s programme Governance of Sustainability, diverse groups of students worked together with organisations to tackle sustainability challenges. In this blog, Annemiek de Looze reflects on how the power of their transdisciplinary approaches…

In this opinion article published in World Development, the authors present five research and policy priorities. While it is clear that ‘pluriversal’ designs need to guide the way forward (Kothari et al 2019), defining a set of key pillars can provide direction and purpose across this pluriversality.…