Hardly anyone in the Netherlands ever watches skeleton racing. But we’ll soon be glued to our TV sets when ‘our’ Kimberley Bos slides down the track at the Olympic Games. All because she stands a good chance of winning a medal. Why do we like winners so much?

Prior to arriving to Leiden, Dr. Abazon completed her Ph.D. at Yale University's Department of Comparative Literature, where she also taught courses ranging from Introduction to Zionism to World Cinema.

Professor Jenny Doetjes has received an NWO grant to research the cross-linguistic properties of quantity expressions and our brain's influence on language.

Many humanities graduates find work in digital heritage, but a good pedagogical model to match education is lacking. University lecturers Karin de Wild and Peter Verhaar want to change this with a Comenius grant.

Associate professor Rens Tacoma has won the 2021 Research Prize for Historical Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Italy Studies Working Group for the best scholarly publication in the field of Italy Studies in Dutch or Flemish academia.

Making friends in a new city can be difficult, which is why the Humanities PopCorner has created the Buddy Programme. The idea is to give international master's students a helping hand in building a social network. Project coordinator Manal Daddah updates us.

When designing public spaces, noise is often a neglected issue. Architects and urban planners know little about it; noise experts see it mainly as a problem that should be solved simply by reducing the volume. University lecturer Andrea Giolai (LIAS), researcher Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn (ACPA) and Professor…

It’ll be a sight to behold: 54 begowned beadles striding through the streets of Leiden. The beadles from 14 universities will gather in Leiden on 25 and 26 August for the 30th National Beadle Day.

More attention should be paid to juvenile idiopathic arthritis. An early diagnosis and robust treatment can prevent irreversible damage. This is what paediatric rheumatologist Rebecca ten Cate said in her inaugural lecture on Friday 22 November 2019.

Berthe Jansen receives an Early Career Award from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for her research on Buddhism and law in ancient Tibet. She receives the prize, an amount of 15,000 euros and an artwork, for her innovative research.

In the coming decades, more than 2 million social housing units in the Netherlands will receive an upgrade in insulation and heating, in order to increase energy efficiency. To study the environmental, financial and social impact of this energy transition, a team of scientists from three universities…

Johan Christensen, universitair docent bij het Instituut Bestuurskunde, heeft 1,2 miljoen euro subsidie gekregen van de Research Council of Norway. Christensen is co-leider van een project genaamd INFLUEX dat de invloed van experts gaat onderzoeken. Naast Christensen maakt ook Valérie Pattyn van het…

The Faculty of Humanities will introduce a new assessment system in the next academic year. Marcel van Brunschot, the project leader for the digital assessment migration, is responsible for overseeing the transition to ANS.

The Netherlands Council of State ruled at the end of March that WhatsApp and text messages on the work and private cell phones of civil servants are considered to be official records. This decision puts the government in a difficult position. How are you going to store millions of texts and WhatsApp…

Japanese newspapers, photo archives from the Dutch East Indies or information on gender and sexuality: all these can be found in the University Library's 621 humanities databases. A flyer campaign to raise awareness of them begins this week.

After the new government announced its plans to cut expenditure on academic education, the Faculty of Humanities launched the flash campaign ‘Stop the Catastrophic Cuts to Universities!’. Now academics across the university have been explaining why their discipline is needed.

Although he works for the Deloitte international management consulting firm, Robin Bergman identifies himself as an "artist, designer and researcher". He is fascinated by technology and nature, and the tensions that exist between them.

We hebben 6 van de 9 grenzen overschreden die bepalen of menselijk leven in de komende generaties nog mogelijk is op aarde. Kunnen we het tij nog keren?

Neuroscientist Simeen Tabassi Mofrad has been awarded a Rubicon grant to conduct research on cortical and allelic determinants of age-related cognitive decline at University of Oxford. She holds the first rank among all Rubicon applicants in NWO Domain Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).

The touring exhibition 'Presenting with the city' has touched down in the Lipsius Building. In the presentation, students and researchers show how their research has contributed to the city.

Every year in February, ninety students who love making music come together in Someren, a town in the Dutch province of North Brabant. Through rehearsals and festivities over ten days, they transform into the latest version of the Dutch Student Orchestra (NSO), which then performs concerts in the Netherlands…

A course that concludes with a video pitch, instead of a paper or examination: Italian Language and Culture students each recorded their own knowledge clip, speaking to a wide audience about Italian cultural expressions. We asked Goran Bouaziz, Cameron-May Bosch and Katja Timmer what they thought of…

Professor Susanna Lindberg has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute for Philosophy with effect from 1 February. In her new role, she aims to foster connections among people. ‘I want my colleagues to feel good.’

How do we account for historical power dynamics when writing new histories of slavery and emancipation? What critical methods can we employ when studying preserved archives and collections? A new book series aims to address these questions. The initiators Karwan Fatah-Black and Ilse Josepha Lazaroms…

PhD student Camil Staps is continuing his academic career in Berlin. He receives a Rubicon grant to do research there on demonstrative pronouns.

The Winter Week of Digital Skills will take place in the PJ Veth building from 29 January to 2 February. There will be different workshops where you can improve your digital skills, from dealing with AI and ChatGPT to setting up your own podcast. University lecturer Jelena Prokic explains more.

In a world beset with war, climate problems and skyrocketing energy prices, it is good to have some 'slack time' now and then. That was Dean Mark Rutgers' message at the Faculty of Humanities' New Year reception.

Male scientists owe their position to their brilliance, women to their hard work. Or do they? The Equalista app helps staff and students at the Faculty of Humanities to become aware of gender equality.

Amsterdam’s attitude to sex work, politeness in historical Arabic letters and malaria in the Middle Ages: again this year, there was a wide variety of topics in the Research Traineeship programme. On Friday 30 August, the trainees finished the last of these projects for now.

The FOI project has a number of topics it aims to investigate. These are: State, Economy, Culture and Papyri. You will find links to bibliographies on this page.

On Monday 28 June 2021, a text based on an interview with Christa Tobler appeared in the Hofvijver (Montesquieu Instituut) on the relationship between the European Union and Switzerland, in particular after the decision of the Swiss Federal Government to refrain from signing an agreement on institutional…

The Leiden Digital Scholarship Blog explored two different ways of opening up research at an early stage: preprints and pre-registration. How to go about making your research or research plans publicly available at an early stage, and what can you expect to happen after you have done so? Among others,…

In the 4 October, 2017 issue of Nature appeared the comment entitled ‘Scientists have most impact when they're free to move’, an analysis measuring the global movements of researchers and reflecting on the potential adverse consequences that isolationist policies may have on the advance of science.

The EU and Switzerland are negotiating a new institutional framework for part of the agreements that regulate their legal relations. More specifically, this concerns new as well as a number of already existing market access agreements.

Martin Sievert, Assistant Professor Public Management at the Institute of Public Administration has been awarded the 'Best Young Researcher Paper Award 2023' of the Permanent Study Group Public Personnel Policies.

The Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University is a partner in the new university-wide Data Science research programme that advocates the use of data science in various fields of research.

Skandapurāṇa IV presents a critical edition of Adhyāyas 70-95 from the Skandapurāṇa , with an introduction and annotated English synopsis.

Roderick Geerts, a PhD candidate of the Faculty of Archaeology in Leiden, takes us on a short journey through the rich history of the Red Sea port of Berenike in Egypt.

Thanks to the Preparatory Year Leiden, refugee students get the opportunity to start a new study or continue their current one. This joint programme of Leiden University and University of Applied Sciences Leiden enters its third year. In this video, participants talk about their experiences.

At least twice a year the Skandapurāṇa team meets to discuss drafts of the forthcoming volume of the critical edition. in March 2016 a five-day meeting was held at Kyoto University, where we discussed several chapters that will be part of Volume IV.

The VICI research project Citizenship Discourses in the Early Middle Ages, led by Els Rose (Universiteit Utrecht), published a new book: Els Rose, Robert Flierman en Merel de Bruin-van de Beek, red., City, Citizen, Citizenship, 400–1500. A Comparative Approach (Londen: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2024). It…

Research collaborative of LUCAS, LUCL and Tabula Rasa (NWO KIEM-Grant)

On 15 January 2019, the external relations committee of the Swiss National Council (lower chamber of the Federal Parliament) held a public hearing on the subject of the draft text for an agreement between Switzerland the European Union with new institutional rules for a number of Swiss-EU market acces…

The Diploma in Medieval Studies entitled European Diploma for the study of Medieval Latin written sources, organised in the framework of the ERASMUS+ programme, was created at Louvain-la-Neuve in 1991. More than twenty European and extra-European universities are involved. The courses focus on methodology…

Lillian McCabe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University and holds an MTS (Master of Theological Studies) from Harvard Divinity School. She studies the history of the occult sciences in Islamicate societies. Her dissertation focuses on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210)…

Professor Emeritus by special appointment Adriaan van der Weel has co-authored a manifesto on the importance of higher-reading.

The LUCAS Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Dr. Renske Janssen for her PhD thesis Religio Illicita? Roman Legal Interactions with Early Christianity in Context.

Her book ‘Veel valse hoop’ (Much False Hope) about the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands was immediately hailed as a seminal work. German historian Katja Happe gave the Cleveringa Lecture on 26 November. She is fascinated by what makes people take a stand.

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…

They call their team ‘The Walking Dead’: Leiden Egyptologists Lara Weiss, Huw Twiston Davies and Nico Staring. A fitting name for a group that conducts research into Saqqara, an Egyptian city of the dead. ‘We are trying to trace religious traditions. What did these mean for people’s lives and burying…