Crises like climate change and loss of biodiversity threaten our planet. That’s why sustainability is an important topic in research and education across Leiden University. On this website you read how scientists from many disciplines work together in researching sustainability.

How dangerous are micro- and nanoplastics? Do they affect the environment? What harm can they do to our bodies? Questions that we can now finally answer because of Fazel Abdolahpur Monikh. Together with his colleagues, he developed a method to detect and quantify nano-sized plastics. Their paper has…

The postwar Liberal International Order faces grave challenges today mostly in the form of geopolitical competitions among great powers and exclusionary identity politics unfolding across different countries.

Career and apply for jobs

The core curriculum equips students with the conceptual approaches and qualitative empirical research methods necessary to analyze law in context. Specialized electives enable students to dive deeper and focus on particular areas of legal practice—from legal mobilization to regulation and compliance…

Young babies laugh like adult apes do: producing sounds while inhaling and exhaling. Adult humans produce sounds on the exhale only. Cognitive psychologist Mariska Kret and colleagues have published an article about the development of human laughter in the journal Biology Letters.

It is a known trait in humans to anchor innovations in the past, so as to make new developments easier to accept. It is an aspect of humanity that can also be spotted in classical and prehistoric times. Archaeologist Daniel Turner will investigate the anchoring of monumental building in Greek Prehistory…

After the new government announced its plans to cut expenditure on academic education, the Faculty of Humanities launched the flash campaign ‘Stop the Catastrophic Cuts to Universities!’. Now academics across the university have been explaining why their discipline is needed.

As a graduate of the Faculty of Humanities, there are unlimited possibilities. Do you want to know more about the sectors and jobs Humanities' graduates end up? Click on the name of the alumna/alumnus to read their story!

Lecture

Sinologist Florian Schneider was awarded the LUS Teaching Prize, officially making him this year’s best Leiden University lecturer. Schneider was commended for his innovative teaching methods based on role-playing.

LERU, the League of European Research Universities, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary on 7 March in Brussels. The network of leading European universities has now grown to include 23 universities.

Mike Schmidli has been awarded a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). From September 2021, he will spend 5 months at NIAS working on his research project titled 'Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and U.S. Interventionism in the late Cold War'. Read the abstract of his…

The specialisation consists of a core course in political theory, a methods course, and several optional modules, including political theory options on themes such as Contemporary Theories of Justice, Human Rights Theory, Borders and Migration, and Environmental Ethics. The specialisation concludes…

Which brain cell does what, when Parkinson's disease arises? It won't be long before this jigsaw is solved piece by piece. Ahmed Mahfouz, computational biologist, combines bio-knowledge from Leiden with algorithms from Delft and is getting closer to finding the key.

Why studying the Advanced Master programme European and International Human Rights Law at Leiden University? We give you 10 reasons! Read more.

In the future, computers will be able to base their decisions on intuition. Professor Jaap van den Herik, director of the Leiden Centre of Data Science, posed this statement today in his Valedictory Address at Tilburg University.

Evolution is all around you every day. This is the message of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) of Leiden University and Naturalis that is offered free of charge to anyone interested.

The CRITTERS exhibition in Naturalis Biodiversity Center lets artists and researchers look for a connection between technology and natural organisms.

From November 4 to 10, the exposition CRITTERS will be exhibited in Naturalis Biodiversity Center during Beyond Human Festival. In CRITTERS artists and researchers are looking for a connection between technology and natural organisms. When does technology become a natural being? And when we examine…

Sixteen researchers at Leiden University have received a Veni award from the Netherlands Organisation for Academic Research (NWO). This award offers promising young researchers the opportunity to further develop their ideas for a period of three years.

What is Leiden University doing to make its buildings future-proof and independent of fossil energy?

Who will win this year's Teaching Prize of the Faculty of Humanities? On Thursday September 12th, we will find out during the faculty party in the Stadsgehoorzaal. Prior to the award ceremony you can come and listen to a mini lecture/HUM Talk of the four nominees in which they will give a sneak peek…

Study all aspects of human life in the past and take on a broad, historic perspective in the specialisation World Archaeology. Or investigate the role of cultural heritage in society in the specialisation Heritage and Society.

As many as 3,472 students from the Faculty of Humanities have filled in the National Student Survey (NSE) in the spring of 2021. This represents a 46% response rate, which is considerably higher than previous years. The results will help study programmes and the faculty to work on what is going well…

Valentina Carraro gave a presentation titled "Strengthening the Human Rights Council and the UN Treaty Body System" at the 'Reinvigorating the United Nations' Conference organized by the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna on January 27th and 28th. During the conference Valentina presented her research on…

On Tuesday 1 December, LLM European Law students Pien Offerhaus and Carina van Os won the Migration Case Note Contest 2020.

The specialisation involves general courses, specialisation-specific courses, electives, research internship and your thesis

In line with tradition, the opening of the academic year will see the presentation of the LUS Teaching Prize to the University's best lecturer. Get to know the nominees. This week: Kim Beerden.

Anke Smits and Lucien van Beek have been awarded a Praesidium Libertatis Grant this year. Smits is an assistant professor at the LUMC and Van Beek at the Faculty of Humanities. They each receive a sum of 75,000 euros from the Leiden University Fund (LUF).

Global Interactions sponsors a number of research projects of Leiden University researchers.

Are you ready to take on an extra challenge during your bachelor’s programme? You may want to check out options like the Honours College, the Humanities Lab and the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA), that will give you additional depth, intensity and study credits.

A Leiden and Mainz (Germany) based team studies the activities of early humans in a 125,000 years old Last Interglacial ecosystem, formerly exposed in a large open cast brown coal pit near Halle (Germany). The Last Interglacial is an important warm-temperate period, showing the full flora and fauna…

Master’s student of Linguistics Marten van der Meulen helped organise the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Miracles of Human Language, which ran from 30 March until 11 May 2015. What was it like for a student to organise an MOOC? And what did he learn from it?

Conference

Key publications of the Predictive Pharmacology group.

How do people acquire language? How can you train your brain? What is the effect of stress on an unborn child? LIBC research topics range from language processing to cognitive robotics, and from psychiatric disorders to the impact of social factors on human behaviour. Meet several main research topics…

More than 100 anthropologists work at Leiden University – not only at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CA/DS) in the Faculty of Social Sciences, but also within other faculties, for example at Archaeology, Law, the Humanities, or the Leiden University Medical Centre…

Leiden University continues to do well in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. For the subject area Politics and International Relations, the 2018 edition ranks Leiden 67th in the world. This is not that far behind the ‘usual suspects’ (Cambridge, Stanford, MIT and the like). Among…

Strategic direction of the Europe Hub lies with a Steering Committee, composed of members from several Leiden University faculties.

To be eligible for North American Studies at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

On June 14th, Jeroen Duindam, Professor of History at the Faculty of Humanities, was awarded an exceptionally high distinction for his achievements in the field of Austrian history.

Spitting cobra venom composition has been influenced by defensive behaviour according to an international research team. This may have originated from the arrival of human ancestors. Students at the Institute of Biology Leiden made an important contribution to the study. Publication in Science on 22…

Salvador Regilme recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in International Relations.

The need for novel drugs as well as innovations in their development and application is as urgent as ever. Below we present our vision , mission, and our key research areas.

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

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It sounds futuristic, but it is possible: the creation of miniature organs of patients in order to study them and see how diseases develop and can be treated. This is what researchers from the LUMC, Twente University (UT), UMCG, TU Delft and the Hubrecht Institute hope to achieve in the next ten years…

Our annual "Science to Experience" exhibition of student works is hosted by the V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media. This year's theme is "LIVING".