During World War II, the Nazi’s ordered a coastal defensive line to be built from the south of France to Norway. This Atlantik Wall aimed to defend their territories in continental Europe from an Allied naval invasion. The defensive line went right through the Dutch city of The Hague. The material remains…

For the following years, Dr Aitor Burguet-Coca will be a returning face at the Faculty of Archaeology. He will join Dr Amanda Henry’s team with his expertise on prehistoric fire use and the methodologies that studying ancient hearths requires.

Conference, Public event

The new Middle Eastern Library (MEL) will bring together the UBL's own Middle Eastern collections and the collections of the library of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), which has been part of the Leiden University Libraries since 1st January 2018.

Professor emeritus Leonard Blussé of the Leiden University Institute for History has won the ‘Special Book Award of China’. The Chinese government awards this prize to translators, writers and editors who have contributed to making China better known among non-Chinese.

Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions research area will be presented on 9 September, in the form a conference. The keynote speaker is Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of the Asia Research Institute of the Singapore National University. The title of his address is Sustainability and…

‘I was very happy and honoured that my thesis was recognised as a valuable contribution to the topic of landscape archaeology.’

LIAS aims to advance the globally conscious vision of area studies, both within and outside the academic community. Focusing on Asia and the Middle East, the institute is a meeting place of multiple fields of inquiry, theories and methods, historical periods, and areas.

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (the NVIC) was founded in 1971. Nine universities in the Netherlands and Flanders participate in the institute with an aim to stimulating internationalisation of their teaching and research activities in the Middle East.

LIAS aims to advance the globally conscious vision of area studies, both within and outside the academic community. Focusing on Asia and the Middle East, the institute is a meeting place of multiple fields of inquiry, theories and methods, historical periods, and areas.

Do you want to discover a language and culture that is completely different from the Netherlands? In the Bachelor's programme Middle Eastern Studies you will study the connections between the different cultures in the Middle-East in the past and present. You will be able to choose from the languages…

A marvelous mosaic synagogue floor has been discovered at the Israeli excavation site of Horvat Kur. The timeworn stones of the mosaic clearly form the name ‘El’azar’. Leiden University researcher Jürgen Zangenberg and a group of Leiden students played a role in the excavation. ‘El’azar was likely an…

This paper explores the long-term endurance of “breath” as a schema of personhood in the Austronesian-speaking world, from a comparative-ethnographic approach to the “Man with No Breath” figure featured in Philippine epics. This is one of two contributions from Myfel D. Paluga and Andrea Malaya M.…

The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world.

Southeast Asia is a term to denote a collection of at present eleven nation-states with an enormous diversity in languages, cultures and religions. Muslims can both take a majority and a minority position.

Joanita Vroom, Associate Professor Archaeology, regularly tries out old recipes, together with a group of Archaeology students. 'You really need to love garlic.'

In Back to Present ACPA alumna Thalia Hoffman discusses the themes, filming structure, and editing process of the short film A Day Becomes (2018) on VIS- (Nordic journal for artistic research).

To what extent is the image of the Taino settlements on Hispaniola representative for the whole island, or is it only related to a few large settlements of known caciques?

Over hundreds of thousands of years, our region witnessed the comings and goings of various types of hominin. This depended on the temperature as ice ages alternated with warmer periods. In ‘De eerste mensen in de Lage Landen’ (‘The First Humans in the Low Countries’) Leiden archaeologists Yannick Raczynski-Henk…

Hidden behind the Academy Building on the Rapenburg lies the oldest botanical garden of the Netherlands and one of the oldest gardens in the world. Founded in 1590 and expanded in the following centuries, the Hortus is the green heart of Leiden.

Early Christian Encounters with Town and Countryside - Essays on the Urban and Rural Worlds of Early Christianity.

A Companion to Cities in the Greco-Roman World offers in-depth coverage of the most important topics in the study of Greek and Roman urbanism. Bringing together contributions by an international panel of experts, this comprehensive resource addresses traditional topics in the study of ancient cities,…

Dr Ruixuan Chen, an alumnus of the LIAS and now assistant professor in Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg, has been awarded the Ernst Waldschmidt Prize. The award ceremony is postponed due to the pandemic and will take place in Berlin presumably in early 2021.

During an Erasmus+ research stay in Rwanda, Frederik Behre gave several guest lectures to bachelor's and master's students enrolled in the various law programmes of the University of Rwanda. In the course of his four-week research stay, Behre organised a series of highly interactive lectures with the…

New edited volume by Mies Grijns (VVI), Hoko Horii (KITLV/VVI), Sulistyowati Irianto (Universitas Indonesia) and Pinky Saptandari (Airlangga University).

Caspar van den Berg, researcher and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, has been awarded a prestigious Veni grant of 250,000 euros from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NOW) for his international comparative research on politicization of top civil servants.

Dr. Moritz Jesse, associate professor of European Union Law at the Europa Institute Leiden, addressed the members and audience of the panel “Citizenship and the Refugee Crisis” at the World Conference of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York, which took place at Columbia University,…

The Lucia de Berk case or the suicide of Slobodan Praljak at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: certain trials keep popping up in media. In her dissertation, Tessa de Zeeuw examines the cultural appeal of such cases and analyses artistic responses. ‘Artworks sometimes have…

Archaeologist Hayley Mickleburgh studies how bodies decompose. This helps with the reconstruction of changes in the burial rituals of Caribbean Indians.

Lecture

On Wednesday January 25, Hayley Mickleburgh was hosted by the radio show de Kennis van Nu (NPO radio 1). Here she told about her work on a body farm in Texas. She investigates the decomposition processes of human remains.

Open Day

Open Day

Inaugural lecture

In Sri Lanka, a prominent Singhalese Buddhist monk publicly proclaims that it is not a sin to kill Tamils. In Japan, the family register kept in a Buddhist temple and specifying the outcaste status of a lineage is provided to private detectives investigating the marriageability of a young woman. Throughout…

Recently, archaeologist Dr Wei Chu received a grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for an excavation in the Carpathian Mountains. Originally planning for an excavation in Ukraine, his plans were disrupted by the war. ‘We had to change plans really quickly.’

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

Archaeologists from Leiden University are contributing to Grens, a theatre performance in Leiden’s Matilo neighbourhood.

This project aims to revisit the relationship between the European cultural agenda and the local identity formation process, and social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine, when the British ruled via the Mandate. What was the role of culture in European policies…

Lecture, Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar

Career Event

The transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic is a major biological and cultural threshold in the construction of our common humanity. Technological and behavioral changes happened simultaneously to a major climatic cooling, forcing human populations to develop new strategies for the exploitation…

Since the end of the nineteenth century Arabic book designers have influenced the social and cultural situation in the Middle East with their work. Huda Smitshuijzen Abi-Farès has written the first global overview of this neglected field of science. PhD defence 10 January.

Career Event