In the week of 14 to 18 January the Lorentz workshop 'Intersecting Worlds. The Interplay of Cultures and Technology' took place at the Lorentz Center in Leiden. Attracting many scholars from across the world, the workshop explored the transformations and responses of indigenous societies around the…

As of April 1, 2018, Erik Danen has been appointed as Professor of Cancer drug target discovery at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). His discipline is cell biology of cancer, in which he focuses on the mechanisms underlying metastasis and therapy resistance.

Video projections in contemporary art are convincing not because they depict reality, but because they show new possibilities within that reality. Artist Sophie Ernst demonstrates this in a thesis and an exhibition. She defends her PhD on 8 December.

The Roosevelt Chair in New Diplomatic History is sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) in Middelburg, and the new position further strengthens the connection between the RIAS and Leiden.

When university lecturer Martine Bruil was on exchange in Ecuador as a teenager, she fell in love with the area's ancient languages. Now, more than 20 years later, she is starting a research project on the kinship of the language Awapit with the Quechua language that was spread by the Incas.

No fewer than 194 students received their bachelor's diplomas in International Studies on Friday 26 August.

From the Spanish Flu during WWI to COVID-19: the role of the American government in these Pandemics. Professor Giles Scott-Smith, who together with Dario Fazzi and Gaetano Di Tommaso completed the book project Public Health and the American State, discusses a century of American responses to health…

On 27 February, Rodrigo Pica, Secretary of Chile’s Constitutional Court, gave a lecture to the students of the Advanced Master’s in European and International Human Rights Law at Leiden Law School.

Jasmina Mačkić, assistant professor at the Europa Institute, presented her research during ‘The Dissident’, a live talk show which is organised regularly by World-Talks, on 24th May 2018. The event revolved around the Nigerian human rights defender Justus Ijeoma, the founder of the International Human…

The International Astronautical Congress (IAC) that took place last week in Paris was extremely successful for IIASL.

On 13 and Friday 14 July 2017 the International Congress took place in Porto, Portugal. The conference was bilangual with simultaneous translations between English and Portuguese/Spanish. In total there were about 350 participants from 23 different countries, however, most of the participants came from…

The aviation sector is now fully aware of the major impact of the corona crisis. Airline companies are appealing to governments for help.

The research article ‘The life history of an enslaved African’ is one of the top 20 read Archaeometry articles in the period of January 2017 to December 2018.

The new special issue on non-western non-state diplomacy, edited by Natalia Grincheva and Robert Kelley, is available online now and contains two Forum essays, four articles and two book reviews.

Stéphanie Noach, PhD within LUCAS, received a Fulbright grant to conduct research for her PhD project 'Dark Matters. Recasting Darkness with Contemporary Latin American Art' at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University.

To enjoy the Winter holidays, the Leiden Leadership Centre has selected several interesting illustrations of leadership.

Monika Baár received a two-month residential fellowship by the Brocher Foundation, an organization located in Hermance (near Geneva) which supports research in the medical humanities.

The Medieval Academy of America (MAA) is excited to announce the launch of a new Summer Research Program for early PhD or early PhD-track students. The 2022 Summer Research Program will convene over Zoom, over the course of six weeks in July and August. The Summer Research Program will culminate with…

During the CLAPEM (The Latin American Congress of Probability and Mathematical Statistics by its initials in Spanish), held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia in September 22-26, 2014, Julián Facundo Martínez received the Francisco Aranda Ordaz Award for his PhD Research in Probability, with the thesis:…

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

Programming courses are often only available in English. All the more reason for the Programming Education Research Lab (PERL) of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Twente to translate the 'Beauty and Joy of Computing' programming…

The Wall Street Journal reviews historian Eric Storm's new book 'Nationalism: A World History', which examines the complex history and development of nationalism and nation-states.

University lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe argues in The Guardian that the Republican's new agenda for a second Trump term is more radical than the first. He says that they seek to take control of federal agencies by replacing civil servants with ‘American First footsoldiers’.

The NWO has awarded Sara Polak a Rubicon grant. In September, she will start a 12-month period of research at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

Lecture, Worlds to Discover: Manuscripts from the Muslim World

Lecture

Researchers from Leiden see hungry villagers in the north of Cameroon steal meat from the prey of lions. The researchers from Leiden University's Institute for Environmental Sciences (CML) reported on this kleptoparasitism in the online publication of the African Journal of Ecology in July.

Erik de Maaker wrote a monograph on how Garo, an indigenous community of the extended eastern Himalayas, experience and negotiate such disparities. The book shows how relatedness is reinterpreted as religious practices change, and communally held land ends up being privately controlled. Erik de Maaker…

She narrowly defied bureaucracy and spent days angling for cod. In the North Sea, marine biologist Inge van der Knaap discovered that noise significantly disturbs fish behaviour. ‘There is now a lot of attention for underwater noise.’

Migration is not only reflected in DNA, but also in language. By tracing changes in language, we learn more about the lifestyle of the people that speak it. University lecturer Tijmen Pronk (40) conducts linguistic research into (pre)historical migration.

Berber languages have long been banned from public life in North Africa, but the situation has changed drastically. Linguistic research is generating new insights on the distant past and on present-day Dutch Moroccans. This is the finding of Maarten Kossmann, the only professor of Berber Studies in…

Whilst 2020 has been an unusual and taxing year for colleagues at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), the Institute nevertheless can look back on an impressive range of successful grant applications during the previous year. This impressive result was achieved on top of excellent results…

Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan’s Black Desert (200 BC to 800 AD)

Cut marks on the bones of bears show that people in North-West Europe used bearskins to keep warm 300,000 years ago.

Leiden University's Academy Building (Rapenburg 73) will be less accessible for traffic and pedestrians on 28, 29 and 30 March because of filming by the BBC along the Rapenburg. Filming will only take place in public areas, not in the University buildings themselves. Some roads may be closed off to…

Of the 29 students who are still in Japan, the remaining four students in Tokyo have been advised to leave the area affected by the disaster.

In some parts of the Roman Empire public meals were the norm: the wealthy treated the whole city to a meal. This phenomenon that suddenly arose and disappeared just as quickly had to do with political and social developments, according to historian Shanshan Wen. PhD defence 6 September.

Can humans sense where north is, using what is known as magnetoreception? This question had master’s student Björn Keyser (Media Technology) so intrigued that he started crowdfunding to be able to study this together with the California Institute of Technology.

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…

Twenty students and alumni from our faculty recently went on a working visit to NATO. Led by Leiden alumna Beaudine Verhoek (MA in International Relations), who is now Officer for Political Affairs and Security Policy at NATO, we were treated to an informative programme at the organisation’s brand-new…

January 1st 2017, Bastiaan Steffens will be taking up the Graduate Teaching Assistance PhD position at the Archaeology and Ancient History department at Leicester University.

Seven master’s students had lunch in the characteristic Humanities Faculty Room with Faculty Board members Mirjam de Baar (vice dean) and Aurelie van ’t Slot (student board member) and gave feedback about their experiences at Leiden University.

Since August 2017, dr. Sarah Schrader is working at the Faculty of Archaeology in the department of Archaeological Sciences. Her expertise is human osteology with a specific focus on the bio-archaeological reconstruction of daily activities. Recently she took over the management of the Osteoarchaeology…

On 29 June 2018, Jan Michiel Otto, professor of Law and Governance in Developing Countries and director of the Van Vollenhoven Institute until 2018, delivered his valedictory lecture entitled De ander als spiegel: reflecties over recht en bestuur in ontwikkelingslanden (The Other as a Mirror. Reflections…

Leiden scientists have discovered a new plant genus with two new species at a potential nickel mine site in Indonesia. Remarkable characteristic of the plants: they store manganese in their leaves.

Are you looking for some listening material for the upcoming long weekend? Staff members and alumni of the Faculty of Humanities have been creating various podcasts over the last few months. A selection is shown here:

Seminar

Recontextualising the Papyri from Roman Soknopaiou Nesos / Dimê (Fayyum, Egypt)

This research project, that started in September 2008, aims to explore how personal and public memories of the Dutch Revolt in the seventeenth century evolved and interacted to create new political and cultural identities for the societies that eventually were to become the kingdoms of the Netherlands…