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.

Are there any differences in gaze behavior between high and low socially anxious individuals? What factors influence the relation between social anxiety and gaze behavior?

Japanologist and linguist Martine Robbeets is going to use her newly acquired ERC Consolidator Grant to study the origins and spread of Trans-Eurasian languages, which include Japanese and Turkish. With it, she’s tackling one of the most controversial subjects in language history.

Leiden University Libraries has made a large number of unofficial poetry journals from China accessible online in its Digital Collections. This opens up thousands of pages from an internationally unique collection of unofficial Chinese poetry for teaching, research, and the general public, including…

On Friday 12 November Professor of Palliative Medicine Yvette van der Linden will give her inaugural lecture entitled: ‘Timeless’. How do we spend our time if illness cuts it short? According to Van der Linden much stands to be gained in the area of care during this last phase of life. Among other things,…

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

The main interest of this research concerns the beliefs and perceptions of Chinese and Dutch university teachers regarding the role of research in university teaching, and how these beliefs and perceptions can be explained by their cultural, institutional and individual background characteristics.

On Monday the 8th of December, the annual symposium of the IBL will be organized at the main building of the LUMC Leiden. This year’s theme is “Integrative Biology towards Healthy Communities”.

Various countries are planning new missions to the Moon. Not just for prestige and science, but also to extract raw materials.

How might viola and string quartet playing in the performer-centered, moment-to-moment and communicative style heard on early recordings be brought about today?

Biodiversity in the Netherlands is having a tough time. Professor of Natural Capital Koos Biesmeijer combines research with practical advice: from the greening of industrial parks to solutions inspired by hi-tech nature. Inaugural lecture 9 March.

Clothes by big Western brands that are on sale in Dutch shops are sometimes made by North Korean workers. The Dutch state is co-financer of a motorway that is being built in Pakistan by exploited workers. These are the conclusions of a report published by the LeidenAsiaCentre on 2 April.

The ‘Locke drawings’ collection and the representation of Brazilian native peoples in global perspective

Mahmood Kooria shows in his dissertation that Islam often adapts to the regional context. PhD defense 14 December.

On 26 October, Leiden University held its first online signing ceremony, signing an agreement with China’s top university Tsinghua to establish a joint PhD programme to co-foster young researchers in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics.

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.

On 6 June, Armin Cuyvers lectured students and staff of the University of Nairobi on EU law and comparative regional integration

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

This thesis focuses on data found in the field of computational drug discovery. New insight can be obtained by applying machine learning in various ways and in a variety of domains. Two studies delved into the application of proteochemometrics (PCM), a machine learning technique that can be used to…

Language research generates a wealth of information about people: from our history and cultural differences to the way we learn. Leiden University shares its knowledge and passion for this topic via de MOOC on ‘Miracles of Human Languages’ and the web dossier on Language Diversity.

Learning analytics tracks students’ online learning activities in order to support their learning. But what if most of their learning takes place offline, out of sight of digital eyes?

On December 11th, Andreea Geambasu succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andreea on this great result.

Otrar as a Case Study for a 6-10th century Transition Zone

A central and much debated topic in the study of language acquisition concerns the nature of the learning mechanisms that are required. Are the computational and learning mechanisms that guide learning about language structure special and specific to language or humans?

Will Leiden be the first city to have wall poems in sign language? It will, if sign language researcher Victoria Nyst has her way. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Leiden Language Museum and the TEGEN-BEELD Foundation.

On 18 July, Olga Ceran held a presentation titled ‘Family law in a united Europe: Child abduction and child relocation’ at a summer school on 'European integration at the Franco-Spanish border: A cross-border perspective' which took place at the Cité des Arts in Bayonne (France).

The literature indicates that teacher professional development and learning may be improved by using formative assessment procedures. This thesis focuses on a specific form of formative assessment, negotiated assessment, which is characterised by the exchange of views between assessor and assessee and…

Conference, Knowledge Café

On 28 July 2020, the Netherlands Board on Research Integrity (LOWI) concluded that a former employee of Leiden University breached several rules of scientific integrity. This conclusion is in accordance with the findings of the Academic Integrity Committee (CWI) of the University in its advice to the…

In design optimization problems, engineers typically handcraft design representations based on personal expertise, which leaves a fingerprint of the user experience in the optimization data. Thus, learning this notion of experience as transferrable design features has potential to improve the performance…

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history by analyzing contact-induced changes and using them to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred.

The first year students of Bachelor Security Studies finished their final block with the course Integrated Project 1. As part of the programme's teaching philosophy ‘Explore, Understand, Do’, students were required to combine the knowledge and understanding they’d gathered throughout their first year,…

Galikyan’s dissertation examines how the multidimensionality of learner­learner interaction data and the multifacetedness of learner-learner interaction itself impact the measurement of learner-learner interaction in digital learning environments.

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

The first year students of Bachelor Security Studies finished their final block with the course Integrated Project 1. As part of the programme's teaching philosophy ‘Explore, Understand, Do’, students were required to combine the knowledge and understanding they’d gathered throughout their first year,…

Professor Claartje Levelt, together with Paula Fikkert (Radboud University), has received an NWO Open Competition grant for research into the development of word production in toddlers.

A former employee of Leiden University breached academic integrity. This is what the Academic Integrity Committee (CWI) of the University concludes in its advice to the Executive Board of the University on 11 November 2019. The Executive Board has taken various steps.