Too expensive groceries, diseases suddenly breaking out: from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, hundreds of people documented the world around them in chronicles. A significant number of these texts have been digitised in recent years. Professor of Early Modern Dutch History and project leader…

Two-day Seminar

Education

Lecture

Lecture, LIMS seminar

Recently Professor Joanita Vroom’s book Feeding the Byzantine City was published by the prominent academic publishing house Brepols. This volume is the fifth in a series called Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean Archaeology, of which she is the editor. ‘This series aims to offer new perspectives…

In the nationalist nineteenth century, people developed an interest in medieval language and literature. The study of medieval material in one’s own vernacular was thought to reveal a great national past. But why, then, was Old English studied by Germans, Danes, Italians and many other nationalities…

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…

When hobby divers revisited a nearly 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Texel, they discovered more than 1,000 objects in wooden boxes. Eight years later, postdoc Janet Dickinson used recovered books to compile a profile of the mysterious owner.

The Research Institute for Mathematics & Computer Science in Amsterdam hosts a unique X-ray machine that creates 3D scans of the most diverse objects. This allows them to reveal details that remain hidden in regular scans. In a series of articles they showcase examples of what happens in the lab. Leiden…

Seven researchers from Leiden University have made a successful application to the Open Competition SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) XS, a Dutch Research Council pilot programme.

Mechanics play a larger role in blood vessel formation, and other developmental biology, than previously thought. Cells appear to respond to mechanical signals, such as pressure. Through the extracellular matrix, a network of fibrous proteins, cells can supposedly exchange those mechanical signals over…

Daniela Kraft's group has succeeded in creating a network of microparticles that is both strong and completely flexible. This may sound simple, yet they are the first in the world to succeed in doing so. A real breakthrough in soft matter physics.

Education

In a closed room in the Van Steenis building, hundreds of boxes are waiting under fluorescent lights for someone to come and see them. The jumble of handwritten and printed labels unveils how often the collection has been reorganized, moved and rearranged. Boxes full of potsherds and pottery, human…

When writing a thesis or paper you must make good use of the insights you have gained during your lectures and studies so far. You should also refer to relevant literature and carry out your own research on the topic.

Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. A study by archaeologists at Leiden University on the use of fire shows that 400,000 years ago knowledge and skills must already have been exchanged…

When deciding what to study you undoubtedly read a lot of information about your study programme. Leiden University employs various systems to provide information about programmes and courses and to facilitate communication between lecturers and students.

Lecture, Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series

Education

On January 17th 2023, Caterina Ghini, Ambassador of Greece to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, visited the Faculty of Archaeology. Her Excellency reached out to Leiden University with the purpose to collaborate and engage with us.

Social

In 2019, Federico Cappadona was one of the first students to enroll in the new master’s specialisation Applied Archaeology. He recently graduated and he is happy to share his experience.

Here you can find some examples of previous projects and output.

When writing a thesis or paper you must make good use of the insights you have gained during your lectures and studies so far. You should also refer to relevant literature and carry out your own research on the topic.

What developments preceded modern Standard Dutch? PhD candidate Iris Van de Voorde conducted research on ‘pluricentricity’, or the idea that language norms arise in different places and spread outwards from there. PhD defence on 19 April.

LUC historian Jacqueline Hylkema unmasks forgeries from the early modern Dutch Republic in the research project "Mapping the Fake Republic".

During the summer, staff and students of the Faculty of Archaeology travel to all parts of the world, initiating or joining fieldwork projects. Read some of our students' stories here!

Tahir Abbas, Professor of Radicalisation Studies at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, organised a book launch for his new book: 'Ruminations: Framing a sense of self and coming to terms with the other'. The book launch took place on Thursday 15 December at Campus The Hague.

Three PhD candidates from Leiden University have been awarded a Mosaic 2.0 scholarship for their PhD research. The Dutch Research Council (NWO) Mosaic 2.0 programme is aimed at an underrepresented group of graduates with a migrant background.

Warja Tolstoj, alumna Art History, has been awarded the 2021 edition of the Ted Meijerprijs. Named after the former director of the KNIR (Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome), the prize is awarded yearly to the best MA/ReMa thesis or PhD in the Humanities.

Lecture

An exhibition at Oude UB takes visitors to the historical Silk Road. Old maps, clothes and jewellery reflect the rich heritage of the cities of Central Asia and their inhabitants.

You speak Japanese, know everything about medieval art or understand exactly what Hegel meant. And then you graduate. Many Humanities students find it hard to enter the labour market. A relevant part-time job can help. Therefore, the faculty has been working together with the employment agency Randstad…

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an Advanced Grant to six Leiden researchers. It awards these significant grants to established principal investigators for ground-breaking, high-risk research.

Every year, an NWO PhD in the Humanities grant is awarded to a prospective PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology. This year, the grant went to Maia Casna, enabling her to study respiratory disease in the past. ‘My hypothesis is that the rapid formation of cities in the medieval Netherlands, must…

Lecture

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

International Symposium on Malaria Studies

Conference

Conference, (in Dutch and partly in English)

From time to time, manuscripts that have remained hidden for centuries turn up in library collections and archives. In the archives of the 17th-century Bibliotheca Thysiana at the Rapenburg in Leiden, kept in the Leiden University Library, Rotterdam researcher Erik-Jan Bos discovered a hitherto unknown…

Forty archaeology students are holding a shovel somewhat awkwardly in the fields at Oss. This is their first day of fieldwork and they are going to use muscles they didn’t even know they had.

The members of the Duivelsei student association are games mad, be it computer or board games. Game of the Goose and Ludo have fallen out of favour. The students prefer more-challenging board games or online gaming instead. ‘You can be yourself here.’

When following a course on archaeology of the Crusaders, five archaeology students were presented the unique opportunity to create a small exhibition at the National Museum of Antiquities. The coronavirus situation made a complex task even more challenging. ‘We had to work through the lockdown with…

What are the origins of the Islamic Empire? And what was daily life like there? Two new Ted Ed animations answer these questions in simple language. Arabists Petra Sijpesteijn and Birte Kristiansen explain what the process of developing the videos was like.

Lecture, Workshop

Conference