In recent years, and especially since the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, a growing body of research, media reporting, and scholarly literature has focused on the role of ‘Arab youth’ as the drivers of social and political movements across the Middle East and North Africa.

The research provides insight into disease behavior in both rural and semi-urban areas in Serengeti in Tanzania.

The study of language in change.

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

This recently released book takes a critical view of conceptual issues and practical problems that inevitably emerge when ‘excellence’ takes center stage in science systems in the Global South. What is ‘excellent science’? And how to recognize and assess it? After decades of inquiry and debate there…

When you apply for admission, you’ll be asked to submit several documents.

You’ve been accepted! Leiden University looks forward to welcoming you as a new student. Your next step is to prepare for your studies. Below you can find some tips to help you get a head start as you embark on your studies at Leiden University.

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

You’ve been accepted! Leiden University looks forward to welcoming you as a new student. Your next step is to prepare for your studies. Below you can find some tips to help you get a head start as you embark on your studies at Leiden University.

Leiden’s Faculty of Humanities is one of the broadest of its kind, offering courses in no fewer than 80 different languages and a very broad spectrum of academic disciplines.

This year is the 444th anniversary of Leiden University and we are celebrating this with the residents of the two cities in which the University has a presence: Leiden and The Hague. We are therefore holding an exhibition about the University and its connections to the city in the Atrium of City Hall…

This collection brings into conversation several kinds of scholarship on medieval authorship which have tended to remain separate over the last two to three decades, a period of steadily increasing scholarly interest in this topic.

Making extensive use of primary source materials this study contributes to existing scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century grammars and grammarians by providing an in-depth study of Ash’s Grammatical Institutes and its influence on other popular grammars for children.

Scientists, including our faculty colleague Dr. Mike Field, studying an exceptionally well-preserved woolly rhinoceros have revealed details of what Britain's environment was like 42,000 years ago. The beast's remains were discovered in Staffordshire in 2002, buried alongside other preserved organisms…

This dissertation examines what network in the human brain is involved in the perception of prosody and whether activity within this network is modulated by the personality trait alexithymia.

Situated at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Spanish Philippines offer historians an intriguing middle ground of connected histories that raises fundamental new questions about conventional ethnic, regional and religious identities.

This PhD-thesis analyses the relationship between the parties’ choices in the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis’ assessments of the election manifestos and coalition agreements over the period 1986-2017, and tries to explain this relationship.

The Vrijthof excavations (1969-1970)

Learn about the newest research from the researchers who are performing it.

Get to know us through our online and in-person events for prospective students!

Get to know us through our online and in-person events for prospective students!

What is it like to study Urban Studies in The Hague? Sonia Dobkowska, second year student, describes what a typical day looks like for her.

The master’s in Philosophy is a one-year, English-taught programme. The programme offers five specialisations:

Develop your knowledge of French and Francophone literary works and genres with the Master’s programme in French Literature and Culture at Leiden University.

If you are interested in an academic programme, but do you not wish to complete the entire programme? Then, you can choose one of the many à la carte courses the Faculty of Humanities offers.

Conference, Public Event

What inspires scholars who study the history, cultures, religions and languages of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia? LUCIS interviewed scholars about their work and research in the video project “Passion in Profession”. The videos are available online now.

Over a decade ago the then foreign minister Abdullah Gül awarded me the “Medal of High Distinction” of the Republic of Turkey. I received the award, consisting of a diploma and a gigantic gold medal, during a festive ceremony at the Turkish embassy in The Hague. The reason I was deemed worthy of the…

What do you do if you have a book from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but you suspect that the binding contains a fragment of a medieval manuscript? University lecturer Thijs Porck has received an NWO grant to experiment with a camera attached to a tube. 'The project boils down to keyhole surgeries…

This project aims to revisit the relationship between the European cultural agenda and the local identity formation process, and social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine, when the British ruled via the Mandate. What was the role of culture in European policies…

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Uncovering ancient Arabian inscriptions feels like pioneering detective work, says Arabist Michael Macdonald in a video interview with Leiden Islam Centre LUCIS. 'First you have to learn the alphabets that they're written in, and then you have to try and work out what they say.'

The aim of the research project is to get insight in the biostratigraphical age and the palaeoecological setting of the Schöningen sites and hominin behavior and subsistence during the late Lower Palaeolithic.

Update : March 2020 A.J. Mills

Many Asian countries are in a process of democratisation. The expectation was that citizens would gradually gain more control over the functioning of their elites. Experts from Leiden have concluded that this process often fails to improve the quality of the administration. They researched the nature…

An Investigation into the role of copper-alloy craft production in the early medieval economy of northwest Europe.

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

Every semester, LUCIS invites a scholar to Leiden to provide a lecture series on a topic of their choice. With these lectures, we aim to present state-of-the-art research in Islamic studies to the Leiden academic community and beyond, and to offer students and junior researchers the opportunity to get…

How do early modern states organize effective rule in difficult conditions? EMStaD YEMEN focuses on a country that due to its geographical, religious and social complexities is now considered a failed state – Yemen.

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…