This book by Dirk Jacob Jansen traces the career of Jacopo Strada (Mantua 1515-Vienna 1588), examining his role at court in Vienna, where he served as Imperial architect and antiquary. Strada’s career was unusually wide in scope and cosmopolitan in outlook even for a Renaissance artist.

This project combines and reconsiders all the available evidence of the Scheurrak SO1, and use new archival databases and modern archaeological techniques to shed new light on the material culture of the Baltic grain trade and the Holland shipbuilding industry at the turn of the sixteenth century.

In the master’s programme Politics, Culture and National Identities, 1789 to the Present at Leiden University you will be at the forefront of a new approach to understand how national politics and identities in Europe are conceived.

Leiden University has a leading position in research and education in the linguistics of languages around the globe, including sign languages. In recent years, digital approaches to studying spoken languages and their communities have rapidly expanded. Language technology and digital approaches relating…

How are night spaces imagined, produced, experienced and narrated by migrant communities in Europe? This research project considers this question in eight European cities: Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cork, Galway, Lisbon, London, Rotterdam. Authorities have historically wrestled with the issue of night-time…

How to understand the simultaneously dis- and reappearance of letters in contemporary culture, and how does this Neo-Epistolarity relate to media-technological change?

The general aim of the project is a description and analysis of the Leiden anatomical collections from a humanities perspective. The project investigates how historical and cultural practices and concerns have shaped anatomical preparations and how exhibitions of the anatomical body have informed cultural…

This catalogue is the result of the EU_CUL project (2018-2021), which explores the use of cultural heritage in Europe for fostering academic teaching and social responsibility in higher education.

How did the life course, with all its biological, social and cultural aspects, influence the lives, writings, and art of the inhabitants of early medieval England?

As museums face more scrutiny and are being demanded to decolonize, there are opportunities for Dominican museums to adopt a critical perspective and turn their collections and exhibitions into connections to our cultural past, present, and future.

Intensive 5-day programme on the world-famous Antwerp-based printing and publishing house founded by Christopher Plantin in 1555. International experts will discuss how it developed the production and distribution of religious books and related illustrations and prints in the following centuries.

What is the role of technology and cyberculture in Korean social structures and in the potential formation of a new collective subjectivity? How do we reorient disoriented souls?

Are you thinking about studying Politics, Culture and National Identities, 1789 to the Present? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Haunted Europe offers a comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK’s relationship to mainland…

PhD defence

Nancy Kula has been Professor of African Linguistics since 1 February. Now is a good time to hear more about her field of expertise and academic interests.

The research aims to understand how did Cuban and Dominican landscape encapsulate historical conceptual transformations about human –nature spiritual interaction after the Spanish conquest? More specifically, what are the present day cultural associations with Cuban and Dominican natural landscape?…

Politics, Culture and National Identities investigates a wide range of national political cultures in Europe and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

On 5 September, Elize de Mul defended the thesis 'Digital Döppelgangers: identity in the Culture of Imagination'. The doctoral research was supervised by Simone van der Hof and Esther Keymolen.

Huda Abi-Fares defended her thesis on 10 January 2017.

Three international research projects involving Leiden University researchers will receive funding from the Una Europa university alliance.

Bones contain information about people’s lives such as where they came from, their age at death and which diseases they suffered from. Researchers can deduce a lot from them about a person’s life and about human evolution. This generates leads that could help solve present-day problems, such as how…

If a society is to be secure, sustainable and resilient, conflicting interests must be reconciled. Researchers at Leiden University study the behaviour of individuals, groups and states in relation to this issue, and use their knowledge to promote equality within and between communities.

The filamentous bacteria Streptomyces are widespread inhabitants of terrestrial soils.

How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested?

On 5 October, Katherine Filesia defended the thesis 'Speaking the same language: the introduction of the Anglo-American trust into the Dutch legal system'. The doctoral research was supervised by Pim Huijgen and Frans Sonneveldt.

Designed for high-achieving students, Leiden University's master's in Middle Eastern Studies (Research) offers you unmatched resources and expertise.

Information activities MSc in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

In 1960, 17 countries on the African continent became independent. Sixty years later, the Africanists from Leiden University are reflecting on what independence has meant for Africa.

After an extensive content analysis of the coalition agreement, a sharp fall can be seen in the focus on education & culture, science & technology and defence. This is the conclusion of university public administration professors Gerard Breeman and Arco Timmermans. They compared the content with all…

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

Dialogue is a multi-dimensional communication mechanism whose processes can only be examined by means of an interdisciplinary approach.

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University is known for its student-centred teaching and world-leading faculty.

Teachers of English as a foreign language in China and the Netherlands have different notions of themselves as teachers in relation to cultures associated with the English language. This is stated in the doctoral thesis of Dadi Chen, who graduates from the Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching…

The use-wear analysis of domestic implements provided new insights of the Single Grave Culture population in the Netherlands.

Communication is the transmission of information. All day long we are busy explaining and making things clear to each other, but exactly how we do that varies from language to language. Associate Professor Jenneke van der Wal delved into African Bantu languages for a Vidi project.

This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of the grammar of Bantawa, a Kiranti (Rai) language spoken in Eastern Nepal.

Five thousand years before the common era (BCE), Proto-Indo-European, the mother of many languages that are spoken today in Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, originated in eastern Europe. PhD candidate Axel Palmér has combined a 175-year-old hypothesis with new techniques to demonstrate how descendants…

During the first year of life, babies adapt to the language they hear around them. In the event of hearing difficulties, this can lead to a language deficiency, which is not so easy to resolve, says Professor of English Linguistics Janet Grijzenhout. Inaugural lecture 19 March.

Covid-19 has transformed Africa Knows! into a unique international knowledge-sharing event: it will now be a three-month online event instead of a physical conference lasting just a few days. Senior lecturer and co-organiser David Ehrhardt is eager to find out how successful this format will be. The…

This work provides a typologically oriented description of clause linkage strategies in Ket, a highly endangered language spoken in Central Siberia. It is now the only surviving member of the Yeniseian language family with the last remaining speakers residing in the north of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk pro…

Like spoken languages, sign languages evolve organically and do not always have the same origin. This produces different ways of communication and annotation. Manolis Fragkiadakis wrote his PhD thesis on this.