The Faculty of Archaeology ranks as the best on continental Europe and is in the top ten of the world. Our master’s degree in archaeology offers the most diverse programme of its type in the Netherlands.

The Faculty of Archaeology ranks as the best on continental Europe and is in the top ten of the world. Our master’s degree in archaeology offers the most diverse programme of its type in the Netherlands.

The MA in History, Arts and Culture of Asia is designed for students interested in taking a humanities-related approach to the study of countries or regions in pre-modern, modern or contemporary Asia.

The Faculty of Archaeology ranks as the best on continental Europe and is in the top ten of the world. Our master’s degree in archaeology offers the most diverse programme of its type in the Netherlands.

Particularly during this time of social distancing and remote learning, it is important to carry on meeting new people – even if you don’t always feel like it after another day staring at your screen, says Wessel van Dam. In his role as assessor at the Honours Academy, Wessel represents the interests…

The Iseum Campense, the impressive sanctuary for Isis and the Egyptian gods on the Campus Martius and arguably one of ancient Rome’s most notable absent presences, is a monument central to various debates.

Both on a personal and institutional level, the staff of Leiden CADS collaborates with:

This book provides a grammatical sketch, glossed texts and a glossary of Tarifiyt Berber, which is the main heritage language of the Moroccan community in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Alternatives to current practice

How do we process language and speech? How do we integrate information at different levels – intonation, sentence structure, meaning, tone, words, sounds - and how does information at one level interact with information at another level?

In 2020 the Utrechtse Heuvelrug project started and in a record time the entire ice pushed ridged was investigated. Thousands of potential new burial mounds, Celtic fields and cart tracks have been discovered.

Fostering multi-polar perspectives that engage more connected, nuanced and pluralistic understandings of the world. Global Interactions encourages and supports research that provides significant new insights on these global processes across time and space.

The master’s programme in Archaeology at Leiden University is the most diverse in the Netherlands. There are several regional and thematic focus areas and research is incorporated in the education programme. Join our international classroom: half of the students come from outside The Netherlands, as…

With our research and teaching, we help make the world a better place. We join in the academic and public debate, and seek answers to economic and social issues – not just at the local and regional level but at the global one too.

Within Una Europa, academic collaboration takes place in interdisciplinary Self Steering Committees (SSCs)

Our East Asia experts work across various disciplines on global issues such as migration, heritage, and colonialism.

Seven researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. This will enable them to start their own project, build their research team and put their best ideas into action.

Charisma K. Lepcha (PI, Sikkim University), Pradyut Guha (co-PI, Sikkim University), Rajib Sutradhar (co-PI, Christ University Bangalore) and Erik de Maaker (Leiden University) have been awarded a two-year grant of USD 18.000 to conduct research on the impact of ‘green farming’ on the sensitive mountain…

What can continuity and change in the manufacturing of locally made ceramics from the early colonials Spanish towns of Concepción de la Vega, Cotuí and Nueva Cádiz (1492-1600) tell us about the choices people made in ceramic production as a reaction the the changing social environment?

A biographical approach to material cultural interactions between Caribbean communities and Europeans across the historical divide (AD 1000-1800)

This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha, from both a molecular-genetic and a linguistic perspective.

This special issue of the International Forestry Review talks about how logging really affects society.

What effect did the lockdown have on young people? Leiden researchers started a study of this in the first year of the covid pandemic. They discovered an impact on the development of the brain areas involved in social behaviour. The researchers published their discovery in Scientific Reports at Nat…

The enormous adaptability of the cholera bacterium explains why it is able to claim so many victims. Professor Ariane Briegel from the Leiden Institute of Biology has now discovered that this adaptability is due to rapid sensory changes in the bacterium. Publication in PNAS.

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

The project Advancing The European Multilingual Experience (AThEME) studied multilingualism in Europe by incorporating and combining linguistic, cognitive and sociological perspectives.

From November 13 to 17 2023, a workshop on Ethics in Caribbean Archaeology was organized at the Lorentz Center in Leiden by Eduardo Herrera Malatesta (Aarhus University), Felicia J. Fricke (University of Copenhagen) and Maaike de Waal (Leiden University).

This dissertation presents a comprehensive description of Xinka, an indigenous language from southeastern Guatemala. The description is based on a missionary grammar that is titled Arte de la lengua szinca and was written by the priest Manuel Maldonado de Matos around 1773.

This book explores intercultural management challenges in sub-Saharan Africa through a case study of Vasco Silva, a Portuguese businessman in Luanda, Angola.

This project aims to open up the pre-Islamic linguistic history of Arabia through the systematic study of the Thamudic inscriptions within a digital humanities framework.

Evaluating processes of Wapishana-English Bilingual Education Programme in Guyana.

Context and contents of the Izcatqui manuscript in the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam

The project ‘Between the Holy Land and the World’ proposes a connected history of the Christian communities in the Near East (1900-1948) by means of a study of unpublished Franciscan and Dominican photographic collections.

The rise and fall of Dutch Brazil (1624-1654) was a major news story in early modern Europe, and marked the emergence of a

The main aim of this research is to understand the dynamics of identity within indigenous Caribbean communities as expressed through the practice of intentional cranial modification. A multidisciplinary approach will be applied to achieve this aim, combining current anthropological and sociological…

This grammar provides a description of Sunwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, based on data collected during twelve months of field work.

An overview of Professional Associations and Journals

The project aims to explore Eurasian elk's role in the ecosystems of the past and its relationship with humans through analysis of its distribution and habitat in the Netherlands.

Nadeera Seneviratne defended her thesis on 21 January 2016.

On the 12th of May, Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta on this achievement.

This project examines changes in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century representations of the legendary twelfth-century general Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159-1189) and how they reflect not only developments in themes of representation, but also changes in the focus of early modern and modern Japan’s…

Material Culture Studies revolves around the analysis of the cultural biographies of all sorts of material objects from flint axes, to pottery, to houses and monumental structures.

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

This dissertation aims to establish a dialogue between ethnomusicology (more specifically indigenous organology), the anthropology of art and the culture of the Apinaye peoples, in order to understand how the musical objects of these peoples are learned and taught, and thus to understand its musical…

As Bolivia reels from the collapse of the government in November 2019, a wave of social protests, and now the impact of Covid-19, this book asks: where next for Bolivia?

Landscape history, representation and identity in the Grenada islandscape

Mission: The Environmental Biology department aims to increase the scientific understanding of how current and emerging anthropogenic threats affect biodiversity and ecosystem services. Through this understanding they facilitate strategic management of natural resources by addressing urgent challenges…

Big Science, commonly defined as conventional science made big in three dimensions, namely organizations, machines, and politics, brings a plethora of different stakeholders together, often for a long period of time. This includes policymakers, scientists, (scientific) managers as well as local “host”…