Contact details for the Leiden University Graduate School of Humanities. The Humanities PhD Admissions Office is situated at the Student Information Desk in the Lipsius building.

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration provides a complete exploration of the prominent themes, events, and theoretical underpinnings of the movements of human populations from prehistory to the present day.

In this article, Tom Buitelaar proposes a systematic framework for analyzing the impact of individual characteristics of peacekeeping leaders on the behaviour of field-level personnel in UN peacekeeping operations.

Advanced biotechnology allows us to select or alter the genetic makeup of human embryos. What limits do we impose on biotechnological intervention in nature and the human body? And whose call is that?

If you are interested in an academic programme, but do you not wish to complete the entire programme? Then, you can choose one of the many à la carte courses the Faculty of Humanities offers.

Why did 'character', 'habit', and 'virtue' serve as key terms in late 19th and early 20th-century scholarly correspondences, biographies, and obituaries? Why did scholars around 1900 display so much interest in the working habits and character traits of what they called the 'scholarly self'?

Islam exists in global history with its richly variegated cultural and social realities. When these specific cultural contexts are marginalized, Islam is reduced to an ahistorical religion without the ability to contribute to humanity. This limited understanding of Islam has been a contributing factor…

On 17 January 2024 Ying Wang successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This study aims to provide a long time perspective of human landscape manipulation. Studying the roles of prehistoric foragers in past ecosystems is of great importance to establish the character of past 'natural' landscapes and to enhance the management of current ones.

An important hormone excreting gland in the human body is the pituitary

Large carnivore population is globally declining as a result of the fragmentation of habitat, large prey depletion and retaliatory killing by pastoralists.

What are the patterns and processes of human mobility in the pre-colonial circum-Caribbean as revealed by burial populations and what are the underlying motives and socio-cultural principles on both micro- and macro-scales?

Are you interested in the neurocognitive and biological roots of learning, behaviour and emotions in children? If so, the programme in Applied Neuroscience in Human Development might be the specialisation you are looking for.

Central in this thesis are the various forms the research-teaching nexus can take in the university, especially in the Faculty of Humanities. The importance of a strong relation between research and teaching is advocated by many academics, but debate is going on about the forms this strenghthened relation…

Digital media are everywhere and are therefore a major part of our lives and the lives of our children. The new specialisation in Digital Media in Human Development focuses on the opportunities and challenges of digital media in child rearing and education.

Gerrie Lodder has published an article in the Dutch legal periodical Nederlands Juristenblad on the exploitation of labour migrants from the perspective of human rights.

How can zebrafish research help understanding human diseases?

From self-driving cars to innovative drug development: artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change our lives in many different ways. We study this technology at a deep and fundamental level. And we seek answers to questions about liability and privacy, for example. Our researchers from…

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century.

The individual in the EU: The application of insights from social psychology to improve the legitimacy and conflict-solving capability of the EU

PhD defence

Our Master Law in European and International Human Rights Law (LL.M.) looks at the various human rights protection mechanisms from a comparative perspective

Do humans and zebra finches share cognitive mechanisms that are important for speech perception?

Explores the relationship between technics and humanity, tracing the emergence of a bio-technical conception of existence in contemporary continental philosophy. Suny Press

What is the history of the humanities? What does this new field look like? How does it relate to the history of science or to the history of individual disciplines (linguistics, history, media studies)? And how can you participate?

A study by a Leiden-Wageningen group shows that present-day humans are biologically poorly equipped to deal with the toxins they are regularly exposed to in smoky environments: compared to earlier hominins, we modern humans are probably even worse off. The study appeared in Molecular Biology and Evolution.…

Large carnivores and humans, along with their livestock, have co-existed for thousands of years. However, human population growth and an increase in economic activities are modifying the landscape for large carnivores and their prey.

Research into the evolutionary backgrounds of our diets can help us make the right choices in diet, health and lifestyle.

The Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law edited by prof. Janice Bellace of the University of Pennsylvania and ass. prof. Beryl ter Haar of Leiden University. The book is publisehd in Edward Elgars series on Human Rights.

Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human is edited by Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker and Philip R. Olson

A new research line is the development of liquid biopsy fingerprints to predict early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) stage in human in readily accessible body fluids in human (in collaboration with: Dr. Geert-Jan Groeneveld, CHDR; Prof. Elga de Vries, Free University Medical Center; and others).

There is no human society that does not employ a rich and diverse language. This course introduces you to linguistics, featuring interviews with well-known linguists and with speakers of many different languages. Join us to explore the miracles of human language!

On 18 June 2019, Peter Kempees defended his thesis 'Hard power and the European Convention on Human Rights'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. R.A. Lawson and Prof. H. Duffy.

What are the humanities? As the cluster of disciplines historically grouped together as “humanities” has grown and diversified to include media studies and digital studies alongside philosophy, art history and musicology to name a few, the need to clearly define the field is pertinent.

This project envisions a broad evaluation of 20th century models of human development over the life course (ontogenesis, human constitution), including socialist and capitalist conceptions across both Eastern and Western Europe.

Large parts of the research described in this Thesis aims at the development of oligopeptide-masked toxins and their in situ immunoproteasome-mediated activation.

Get to know us through our online and in-person events for prospective students!

Are traces of fire use detectable in ancient hominin genomes?

Efficiently responding to others’ emotions has great survival value, especially for social species, such as primates, who establish close, long-term bonds with group members. The closest living relatives to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Studying these species, and comparing them on the exact…

This book explores how physicists, astronomers, chemists, and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed ‘epistemic virtues’ such as accuracy, objectivity, and intellectual courage. In doing so, it takes the first step in providing an integrated history of the sciences…