Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

In 1960, not one but 17 African countries became independent. Sixty years later the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) is offering a wide programme to mark this celebration. African Studies itself proved to be a topic of conversation at the kick-off conference on 30 January.

The second authors' conference of the General Labour History of Africa (GLHA) project will be held from 10 to 12 December 2015 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Insults have a stronger effect on people from honour cultures because their honour is at stake. Escalations can be prevented if their sense of honour is left intact or if the perpetrator expresses sincere regret Leiden psychologist Said Shafa has found.

The Leiden Centre for East African Law (LEAC) has been awarded a grant of €25.000 by the EU delegation to the East African Community (EAC) and the Secretariat of the EAC.

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history by analyzing contact-induced changes and using them to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred.

The Academic Language Centre (ATC) is one of the cornerstones of Leiden University. Director Gea Hakker explains how this organisation is providing quality (online) language courses and meeting new demands.

Israel was ordered to take steps to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. Giulia Pinzauti, an expert on state conflicts and humanitarian law, explains the significance of the case, the specific details of the ruling and what we can expect to happen next.

Academic studies or an academic career are a big challenge if you are deaf. Particularly in Africa, where many countries don’t even have secondary schools for the deaf. A team of Leiden academics has organised the first summer school for and by deaf academics on the African continent, in Ghana. We spoke…

uman skin equivalents (HSEs) are in vitro 3D-skin models that mimic many aspects of the native human skin (NHS) and can be a valuable tool.

On 1 August, Egbert Fortuin has been appointed Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics. After a five-year term as vice-dean of the Faculty Board, he is eager to fully devote himself to the study programme. His appointment can therefore be summarised in three words: 'I am back'.

The Summer School in Languages and Linguistics has been a regular event on the Leiden Centre for Linguistics calendar for over 14 years.

To maximise your personal development, we ensure tutorials are small-scale and staff members extremely accessible. In year one, you’ll have an average of 12 contact hours, half of which comprise lectures (in English) and the remainder tutorials (optionally Dutch or English).

The Pandora Papers turned the spotlight on Wopke Hoekstra’s investment in an African safari company via a tax haven. Apparently, there was no tax evasion, but that does not seem to be the whole story. Martijn Nouwen, assistant professor in tax law, explains in Follow the Money how the safari enterprise…

Development and validation of instruments that can measure different aspects of emotional competence in children with normal and atypical development, and in different cultures

Important dates in the Academic Language Centre calendar

Language learners in higher education increasingly conduct out-of-class self-directed learning facilitated by mobile technology. This project aims to explore how university students use mobile technology for their self-directed language learning and investigate factors that influence their self-directed…

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

What are the rights of migrants in Morocco and how do this receiving state and migrants deal with them in practice?

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

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.

On the occasion of the conferral of an honorary doctorate to children’s rights activist Graça Machel, a fund has been established that will enable two female students from South Africa to come and study in Leiden.

Leiden is to have a new language museum in 2015, a public institute focusing on language in all its facets and where science and social developments come together for a broad public. It won't be in a building, but at different places in the city. Dynamic, contemporary, flexible and affordable. The details…

5 talented Leiden humanities scholars have received a Vidi research subsidy of 800.000 euros to set up or expand their own line of research.

At one time, the railway from Kimberley to Kambove in Southern Africa symbolised prosperity and progress. Today, the exhausted mining towns along its route are marked by decay and pollution. Professor Jan-Bart Gewald has been awarded an NWO L grant to investigate the long-term global consequences.

An experimental approach to organic palaeolithic technology

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

The physical features of twelfth-century manuscripts from the Flemish abbey of Ter Duinen – such as script, page layout, and reading aids – show how their readers organized, interpreted, and transmitted knowledge.

What workflow of non-destructive techniques provides accurate, valuable data to improve our understanding of Caribbean archaeological landscapes? How were Amerindian settlements configured?

What languages do you speak? According to Felienne Hermans, ‘Python’ could be an answer to this question. Hermans studies how people learn to program at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University. In an article of the NewScientist she explains why programming is similar…

In the Bachelor Honours Class ‘The Noble Art and Tricky Business of Translation’, Honours students learn about the tricky business of translation. To gain hands-on experience, students had to translate a poem for the seminar on poetry. For some translators-to-be, one language was simply not enough.

Fokelien Kootstra defended her thesis on 23 April 2019

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

In this article, the authors explore the concept of recurrent events, particularly focusing on the Eurovision Song Contest.

Leiden University’s Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies programme is a one-year, full-time Master’s programme that is taught completely in English. Building on a tradition of more than four centuries of studying the Middle East, we offer highly relevant and up to date insights into a wide variety of…

Where does Dutch come from? Newly appointed Professor Alwin Kloekhorst looks for an answer to that question in millennia-old languages from Anatolia, the Asian part of present-day Turkey. 'A new interpretation in one of the Anatolian languages can have consequences for dozens of other languages.'

According to Nivja de Jong, second language acquisition is 'the most fascinating subject in linguistics'. As a recently appointed professor of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, she studies the question of how best to teach people a new language.

During her study of Latin America, Tineke Floor laid the intercultural foundation that has served her well in her career. Floor currently works as Director Europe at African Parks, an NGO that promotes nature conservation in Africa. How does she look back on her studies? And why the leap to another…

Author and political scientist Mounir Samuel has spent recent years delving into the many ways that language can exclude people and bring them together.

On the 8th of September Yun-An Olivia Dung successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.