The basic program comprises a total of twelve courses organized by the Research School, that have been purpose-developed for training and support of PhD students and Research MA students who specialize in Medieval Studies (history, art history, and literary history, in particular).

Leiden University and the Netherlands National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) are jointly involved in the intensive archaeological exploration of Northern Syria, by means of field surveys and large-scale excavations at a number of archaeological sites in the Balikh basin: the Tell…

By examining the impact of Islam on the daily life of those living under its rule, the goal of this project is to understand the striking newness of Islamic society and its debt to the diverse cultures it superseded. Questions will be the extent, character, and ambition of Muslim state competency at…

On 8 December, on the occasion of her 65th birthday, Cisca Hoogendijk was surprised with a festive bundle of 56 text editions by friends and colleagues, edited by her former students Dr Joanne Vera Stolk and Guus A.J.C. van Loon, MA.

Mattias Brand’s dissertation, The Manichaeans of Kellis: Religion, Community, and Everyday Life (Leiden, 2019) has been selected for one of the five prestigious Praemium Erasmianum Dissertation Awards 2021.

How does a Leiden alumnus end up working at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met)? In the case of Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, it was partly down to chance, luck, fate. But that was preceded by a unique degree in decorative arts in Leiden.

Philology and Manuscripts from the Muslim World

The Institute CADS adheres to and teaches an approach to research ethics and integrity that emphasizes the processual nature of informed consent, situational ethics, and the indispensability of continually updating the ethical tradition in international anthropology in all the work of its researchers…

Law

LUCAS hosts a wide variety of research. Here we outline some of the most important research themes.

Primary Objective: The primary aim of the proposed RCT is to evaluate whether LF-TLP in blended form as an indicated prevention for anxiety complaints is more (cost-) effective than TAU according to the NHG guideline Anxiety. We hypothesize that in comparison to TAU, LF-TLP will result in a significantly…

The LUCDH funds the development of Digital Humanities & AI research activities, knowledge, and skills through a Small Grants program.

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

The English Language and Culture programme focuses on four areas, namely: philology, literature, linguistics and language acquisition. It also offers several specialisation options, ranging from renaissance literature to the use of metaphors.

The one-year History specialisation in Ancient History offers an attractive mix of theoretical knowledge and practical experience.

PHM offers you the tools to navigate through, and give direction to, the complex and changing health care landscape by using an interdisciplinary approach. Become the broker to improve health and societal outcomes for citizens and patients.

Learn the newest insights from established researchers.

Translating ancient texts, filling in missing parts of clay tablets: articles are popping up more and more often about the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence for researching documents in the oldest scripts. Are we better off leaving the deciphering of ancient texts to computers from now…

Just published:

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…

How should the Quran be read? The manuscript of this holy book makes different interpretations possible. Researcher Marijn van Putten has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of two million euros to explore centuries-old recitations.

Humans perceive the world through different senses: we see, feel, hear, taste and smell. The different senses with which we perceive are multiple channels of information, also known as multimodal. Does this mean that what we perceive can be seen as multimedia?

Until the 18th century, Latin annotations of well-known classical texts were an important source of scientific knowledge, but over the course of time the texts lost their authority. Classical scholar Maarten Jansen re-examines the annotations of Virgil's Aeneid. PhD defence 20 September.

Suzan Verberne has been appointed professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from 1 October. Verberne has been at LIACS since 2017 as group leader of the Text Mining and Retrieval group.

The biweekly Lunch Time Seminar is an online only event, but it is not publicly accessible in real-time. If you would like to attend one of the upcoming sessions, please send an email to sails@liacs.leidenuniv.nl.

PhD candidate Lilo Nein investigates relations between texts and performances from the perspective of visual art.

Assistant Professor Anna Dlabacova has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. She will use this grant of around 1.5 million euros to conduct research on the Dutch vernacular ‘book of hours’.

Fiction is more effective than autobiographical non-fiction when it comes to conveying the sensation of enforced solitary confinement. That is the conclusion of writer and lawyer Maarten Asscher in his study 'Het uur der waarheid. Over de gevangenschap als literaire ervaring' (The Moment of Truth: Imprisonment…

Last year, LUCSoR welcomed a new colleague: Yves Menheere. At the start of his position at LIAS, he applied for and received a starter grant. Read in this interview what he plans to do with the grant and learn more about his research on Taoist priests. Yves has also shared some photos from his field…

The AI chatbot ChatGPT has a clear left-liberal bias when filling in the Stemwijzer voting advice application. This was discovered by master's student Merel van den Broek during an assignment for the Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing course.

On February 2nd, 2018, Professor Sven P. Vleeming of Trier University was presented with a ‘Festschrift’ to celebrate his retirement last summer. The book was presented to him, in the presence of friends and colleagues from the Netherlands and abroad, by the editors: his former Leiden colleagues Koen…

While humanities once mainly involved books and archives, nowadays we can’t imagine life without AI. Next semester a new faculty-wide course will be introduced, taking you along with this development. University lecturer and course coordinator Yann Ryan tells us more about it.

A global perspective on the nature and evolution of nationalism, from the early modern era to the present.

Ancient historians have long been aware that patterns of coin circulation can shed light on levels of economic integration in the Roman Empire. More than forty years ago, Hopkins argued that large amounts of tax money were spent in the frontier provinces and that the non-military provinces recouped…

IT lawyer Eduard Fosch Villaronga wants to promote diversity and inclusiveness in AI research. And that's really important, because he has observed how artificial intelligence - from Twitter to walking robots - is prejudice in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation.

Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organised the exhibition…

Lecture, Global Questions Seminar

Digital Humanities Student Network

This project aims to design Principles and Guidelines to improve coordination between courts in Europe for insolvency and related proceedings.

This dissertation together with the artworks documented in it is the result of an investigation across multiple media over a seven-year period of the cultural, artistic and spiritual legacy of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement.

Conference

The work of judges can also be done by AI systems. These systems can formulate an objective proposal for a ruling. But such proposal should always be checked by a judge, says Bart Custers.

Harriet Hunter defended her thesis on 26 September 2018.

Training a robot in a real-life environment is more or less impossible. Computer scientist and psychologist Roy de Kleijn switched to training in a simulated, virtual one instead. ‘You do have a reality gap, but the more precisely you train the robot, the better it is in practice.’ His inspiration:…

This project investigates the full ecosystem of Middle Dutch prayerbooks in order to answer questions about their role in – and impact on – religion, culture, and society in the late medieval Low Countries.

Machine learning - on classical computers- has made great progress in the past five years. Computer translation of speech and text is just one example. In Leiden, some researchers expect that machine learning, empowered by quantum systems, even if they only contain a few dozen qubits, can lead to a…