Two hundred years ago Caspar Reuvens was appointed as the first professor of archaeology in the Netherlands. He was to lay the basis for both the National Museum of Antiquities and the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University. To mark the occasion, the faculty is organising an anniversary lecture…

Nadine Chahine, designer of Arabic typefaces and external PhD candidate at Leiden University, has been named in Fast Company's 2012 ranking as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. ‘I see type as the means to engage in the larger context of culture and society,’ commented Chahine.

Dr Thomas Fossen (Institute for Philosophy) has been awarded with an NWO Veni grant for his research project 'Critical moments: How do events affect how we should judge the legitimacy of political authorities?'

Leiden University is working increasingly closely with Chinese universities. On 22 November the Rector signed a statement of intent to ratify the relationship with Xi’an Jiaotong University. Shanghai International Studies University is to include Leiden University as a strategic partner institution…

Dr. Gabrielle van den Berg received a prestigious VICI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for her project

The Netherlands sees thorny dilemmas placed with regard to the conviction of returning IS fighters. The Netherlands, like the other EU member states, does not respond to the Kurds' wish to take back 'their' Syrian people. Bart Schuurman, terrorism expert, states that an international tribunal, flanked…

On 29 October a terrorist attack occurred in Nice. On the same day assaults also took place at the French consulate in Saudi Arabia and in the city of Lyon. How is it that France is so frequently targeted by extremists?

On 24 January an interdisciplinary workshop organised by Anna Smulders, PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, and Tarlach McGonagle, Professor of Media Law and Information Society, took place on the interaction between disinformation, emerging technologies and human rights.…

On Thursday 27 June, the last festive ILS Lunch Seminar of this academic year takes place. This seminar will feature presentations from two distinguished speakers from different departments of Leiden Law School: Prof. Pablo Mendes de Leon and Albert van Marwijk Kooy.

On 11 and 12 April, the kick-off conference “The role of law in Libya’s national reconciliation” took place. The conference marked the official start of a research project by the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden University and the Centre for Law and Society Studies of the University of Benghazi on…

If the recent bushfire crisis and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic have taught us anything, it’s that Australia has an opportunity to evaluate its coordination on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR).

Ook Polen wil het recht op een tijdelijk afschaffing op asiel, zo maakte premier Tusk onlangs bekend. Hoe groot zijn de kansen in Brussel en vormt dit een optie voor Nederland? Mark Klaassen, universitair docent Immigratierecht, spreekt over de kwestie in het Algemeen Dagblad.

The Leiden Archaeology social media team presents its first documentary on one of our faculty's research projects. A team led by Bleda Düring, Victor Klinkenberg, and Maria Hadjigavriel explores the Cypriot Chalcolithic period in Palloures, Cyprus.

Medievalism is the area of academic study that investigates the reception and reconstruction of the medieval past since the Middle Ages came to an end.

The Yearbook for Dutch Book History publishes Dutch and English articles on the book history of the Low Countries, in all time periods (including the Middle Ages). For the 30th Yearbook, to be published in 2023, they welcome in particular contributions for the theme ‘Technology and Transformation’.…

A conversation about expanding the disciplinary boundaries of the study and teaching of pre-modern English literature, on the occasion of the publication of Sjoerd Levelt’s The Middle Dutch Brut: An Edition and Translation. With: Shamma Boyarin (University of Victoria), Shazia Jagot (University of York),…

The "Cognitive Turn" and the Middle Ages - There is an increasing interest in the cognitive sciences and how knowledge from this area influences literary studies, history, art history, and studies in material culture. This meeting seeks to discuss the possibilities, but also the limitations of incorporating…

A full-time tenure-track position in the field of the cultural history of the Middle Ages is vacant in the Department of History of the Faculty of Arts on KU Leuven Campus Kulak Kortrijk. The KU Leuven seeks applications from internationally oriented candidates with an excellent track record in research…

The chair of Ancient and Medieval History at Radboud University Nijmegen is organizing a new lecture series. In the RAM-lectures, a great variety of scholars in the fields of Antiquity and the Middle Ages will discuss their research. Students, PhD’s and staff are most welcome to attend. The lectures…

Student organisation Teiresias organizes a lecture series on how to turn your master’s thesis into a publishable paper. In three days, experts from the world of academics and publishing will be presenting their advice on how to write your first publication. The aim is to cater specifically to the niche…

This one-day conference, organised by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), invites you to share your research ideas and results in practices of comparative medievalism in arts and culture. We therefore invite contributions of papers that analyse cultural representations of the…

The International Reynard Society studies the role of animals in the European literature of the Middle Ages and its afterlife. It focuses especially on beast epics, fables, and fabliaux. The 24th international colloquium of the Society – Of Foxes and Fish: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Medieval Animal…

On 17-20 October 2023, the ERC-funded project PASSIM (Patristic Sermons in the Middle Ages), based at Radboud University Nijmegen, will organise an international conference on the medieval reception and transmission of patristic sermons and the collections in which they are compiled. The conference…

The role of religion in the identity construction of LGBTQIA+ folks

Archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois received an NWO Vidi grant to investigate the emergence of a pan-European culture in the third millennium BC. ‘We see ideas being shared across the entire continent in pre-literate societies. And not only that, for a thousand years, the same cultural ideas persist.’

This project aims to answer the following questions: how did the landscape and geography of the local surroundings of Chalcis impact medieval to early modern productivity, habitation, mobility and interaction in a wider sense? And where are such changes and continuations still visible in the landsca…

Study all aspects of human life in the past and take on a broad, historic perspective in the specialisation World Archaeology. Or investigate the role of cultural heritage in society in the specialisation Heritage and Society.

Conference, Symposium

The Leiden Ancient History specialization concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors. The appearance of these empires led to the development of an interaction network…

An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore. Archaeologist Alex Brandsen has now used deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to develop a search engine…

Iraqi-Kurdish student of Middle Eastern Studies Bareez Majid has been nominated for the ECHO Award. ‘She has a strong personality, though she may appear unassuming at first,’ was the comment from one of her lecturers.

No matter how hard Chinese communists tried to control the economy, they could not stop the free market from flourishing. This was the message given by historian Frank Dikötter on 7 February during a lecture on the Cultural Revolution. He will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate on 8 February.

This is the Board of Advisors of CompaRe.

The one-year master's in East Asian Studies, a specialisation of Leiden University’s master's in Asian Studies, offers focused study of either China, Japan or Korea.

How did free agents in the Dutch Republic react to the creation of colonial monopolies (VOC and WIC) by the States-General? This project answers this question by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of an informal global empire parallel to the institutional empire devised by the…

This Global and Comparative Philosophy master’s programme is unique in Europe. It offers comparative perspectives from around the world that will enable you to be part of the next generation of thinkers: someone studying and shaping philosophy for a globalised 21st century.

Hanan Hammad and Eftychia Mylona give a master class focusing on conceptual and methodological challenges in writing histories of marginalized social groups.

The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA Middle Eastern Studies, but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the Master’s p…

What is movements and corridors of the Bornean pygmy elephant in Sebuku forest? What is the nature of human-elephant conflict in Nunukan District in time and space? What are the diets of the Bornean elephants related to crop raiding?

The socio-political and cultural memory of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire played a very important role in Antiquity and later ages. This book is the first to systematically chart these multiform ideas and associations over time and to define them in relation to one another, as Persianism.

This dissertation develops an innovative approach to cultural transformation in the kingdom of Commagene (modern south-east Turkey) during the 1st c. BCE, focusing on a palatial context in the capital Samosata.

In this lecture professor Harding considered the implications of Asia's 21st-century rise for its legal systems and our approaches to studying them in the new situation we confront in the early 21st century.

An overview of Professional Associations and Journals

Documenting and describing languages of the world.

In developing cooperation on research and education with China, Leiden University focuses on projects that promote innovation, have an impact on science, and benefit society

The present monograph, spanning a wide range of world and local literatures represents a high academic standard of both literary criticism and philological analysis. By demonstrating her expertise as an Africanist conversant with the Arabic canon, Raia reveals how the narrative of Joseph has been re-narrated…

This dissertation contains a detailed description of the Carib language, including the most extensive dictionary of the language to date. This knowledge is based on work from earlier sources and field work which was carried out by the author over a ten-year period, particularly in Galibi, a Carib village…

The correspondence of the Dutch factory in Hirado, Japan, 1609-1633

At LUCL we study almost all aspects of a wide range of African languages. From phonology to anthropological linguistics, from theoretical syntax to urban youth languages, we study it all.