Leiden physicist Maarten Kruithof has discovered how our DNA is infallibly able to fold itself and to unfold again. In his dissertation he demonstrates how DNA is folded in a single long, very flexible spiral.

Until recently the Congo’s isolated Boa community had never read a single letter in their own language: quite simply, there was no alphabet to describe the language. A crowdfunding campaign by guest staff member Gerrit de Wit has changed that. He plans to use the rest of the money to work with a Congolese…

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.

This book underscores the interplay between religion and politics (local and global) in the production, escalation, management, mitigation, and resolution of conflict.

Research on the morality of life insurance. What issues are raised when insurance companies define responsibility and solidarity? Has insurance changed since the crisis of 2007?

At LUCIS we offer a varied programme of scholarly meetings (conferences, workshops) which reflect our multidisciplinary and comparative view on Islam and Muslim societies in past and present.

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2024.

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…

The Journal of Global Slavery (JGS) aims to advance and promote a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery from comparative, transregional, and/or global perspectives. It especially underscores the global and globalizing nature of slavery in world history.

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

To be eligible for Mathematics at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Statistics & Data Science at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Astronomy Research at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Mathematics and Education at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

JUSTREMIT is an ERC-funded project that brings together political theory, ethnography, and security studies in an interdisciplinary study of remittances and global justice.

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) and the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law (ACMRL) of the VU University Amsterdam organise a public seminar about global migration and refugee law in Egypt and Morocco, focusing on the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers…

To be eligible for African Studies at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Applied Archaeology at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

This Philosophy bachelor's programme offers perspectives from around the world. It will make you one of the next generation of students who will shape philosophy in the 21st century, ready to take on academic or professional challenges that call for critical thinking, analysis and argumentation skil…

One of LUCIR’s key objectives is to bring together scholars and students of International Relations. To this end, LUCIR regularly organises events such as conferences, roundtables, lectures and book launches.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) aims to demonstrate its relevance to society by means of high-quality research, excellent education and various outreach activities. A few highlights:

The Research MA Classics and Ancient Civilizations covers two years and can be studied in four tracks: Classics is one of them. While diving into the literary, cultural and intellectual worlds of Greece and Rome, you will be involved in current research, and stimulated to reflect on the significance…

Course, Terra Incognita Masterclass

How did the Dutch Empire compare with other imperial enterprises? And how was it experienced by the indigenous peoples who became part of this colonial power?

An integrated geo-archaeological research of the hominin site Trinil on Java

Women in International Security -Netherlands (WIIS-NL) is an affiliate of WIIS Global. WIIS-NL Members include: professionals, civil servants, academics, NGOs, employees of international bodies and organizations, embassy staff, politicians, students, and interested members of the general public. The…

On 18 September 2019, Huw Llewellyn defended his thesis 'An Institutional Perspective on the United Nations Criminal Tribunals: Governance, Independence and Impartiality'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. N.M. Blokker and Prof. L.J. van den Herik.

The Editors of PAIR are always interested in suggestions for themed editions. Anyone wishing to propose a theme and/or to assist as a ‘guest editor’ should contact one of the editors of PAIR.

In 2019 Leiden University was 444 years old. This special birthday called for a special celebration. We celebrated this milestone with the residents of Leiden and The Hague. In, with and for these two cities.

How can we promote more durable solutions to protracted refugee situations and which roles can connectivity and mobility of displaced people play to improve protection and resilience?

Could an emergent Cinema of Un-Belonging discover forms of narrative time relevant to the long-term, inter-generational fractures caused by forced traumatic dispersion?

This book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial…

North, Middle and South America together constitute the single largest area in World Archaeology that is taught as a single focus. It is also the only major world area that saw societies develop from hunter-gatherers to early empires entirely independent from developments in Eurasia & Africa. It is,…

LIAS has a School of Asian Studies (SAS), a School of Middle-Eastern Studies (SMES) and a School of Religious Studies (LUCSoR). These designations, and the fields within them, remain foundational to our work. At the same time, the academic community benefits from the presence of cross-regional networks…

CADS researchers give methodology their own unique signature through two parallel engagements: (a) teaching and researching the full range of social science methods, from audio-visual engagements, through global ethnography, to statistical analysis; and (b) interrogating these multiple modalities employing…

The researchers in the World Archaeology department of the Faculty of Archaeology concentrate on a range of different periods and regions: from humanity’s origins to the Middle Ages and the modern age, and from Asia to South America.

Since the Middle Passage is in the North Atlantic, and the North Atlantic has a relationship with the arctic, what relationship does the Arctic have with the Middle Passage? How can this relationship be used to provide a space of healing by uncovering Afro/diasporic counter narratives?

The research in this dissertation aims to optimise blood donation processes in the framework of the Dutch national blood bank Sanquin. The primary health risk for blood donors is iron deficiency, which is evaluated based on donors' hemoglobin and ferritin levels.

The IBL represents the core of modern biological research at Leiden and we interact closely with the other life science Partner Institutes in the faculty:

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

Chinese organisations increasingly operate across the borders of China, and growing numbers of people from outside China are coming to live there. Professor Frank Pieke believes these movements have a significant effect on central and local government policy in China.

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

The Botany Laboratory is part of the Faculty of Archaeology, University of Leiden. Under the supervision of Dr Mike Field, research is carried out here on archaeo- and palaeo-botanical material including seeds and fruits, pollen and spores, and wood.

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

The research profile ‘Asian Modernities and Traditions’ (AMT) aims to raise the strength and visibility of research, teaching and dissemination on Asian studies at Leiden University.

This liber amicorum is a tribute to Prof. dr. ir. Hans H. de Iongh, associate professsor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) of Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Antwerp, on the occasion of his retirement on 27 October 2016.