Friday 26 January 2018 saw the festive opening of the Bob Wessels Insolvency Law Collection. This Collection is a most valuable addition to the present prestigious collection on (international) insolvency and commercial law and will be expanded and kept up-to-date in the coming years.

Almost 4400 anatomical drawings from the collections of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) are now available through Europeana. The collection shows medical art on paper from the early eighteenth century to the present day. Most of the drawings were created in or around the Leiden University Medical…

Lecture

Utrecht University Library invites researchers, students and other users of their digital collections to complete a survey about this: what material are you looking for (and can you find it), what functionalities do you use, what do you like and what could be improved? The library uses the suggestions…

You are invited to sign in for the Tabula Gratulatoria for a volume that has been composed for the occasion of Prof. Dr Marc Boone’s retirement.

All over Europe you will find ethnographic museums with large collections of indigenous objects from Latin America. These collections shaped the image of native populations in the European mind. An ERC Starting Grant allows Dr Martin Berger to look at the bigger picture, contextualizing individual collections…

Everything you need to know about the minor Cultural Memory of War and Conflict.

Neanderthals at Pech-de-l'Azé I in South Western France had a striking use for manganese dioxide 50,000 years ago.

For all the artworks that Riccardo Giacconi creates, he begins by conducting extensive research. He discovered three stories about rebellious characters that were transmitted through unofficial channels: as characters in puppet shows or in folk tales. He translated the three stories into three cycles…

What does a 19th-century exhibition of traditional utensils from the province of Zeeland tell us about the current rise of populism? A lot, Ad Maas will say in his inaugural lecture.

Would you like to do collection-oriented research, but do not have sufficient resources? Every year, the Museums, Collections and Society (MCS) research group makes several research scholarships available for this purpose. Researchers Elizabeth den Hartog and Marika Keblusek previously received an MCS…

The map of Suriname, drawn in 1830 and acquired by Leiden University Libraries (UBL) in 2023, has now been made available online via Digital Collections in open access. The map can be viewed and downloaded in high resolution.

Skate legend Tony Hawk came to Antwerp. Belgium newspaper De Morgen published an article on the changing skate culture. Cultural Anthropologist Sander Hölsgens shines his light on this theme and talks about the democratisation of skate boarding, activism, public space and collective memory of skater…

The research focuses on the understanding of symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain (one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico), by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) recently participated in the Pagode-Europeana-China project as an associated partner. As a result, almost two hundred items related to China from the UBL Special Collections are now available via the Europeana website. The UBL was the only library to participate in…

With the addition of over 16,500 new catalogue records, the collection of Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis (1797-1872) is now almost entirely searchable online. The private collection of the Leiden map collector laid the foundation for the special collection of maps and atlases of Leiden University.…

A platform to research memory and culture in the Muslim world. This programme explores the ways modern memory studies methodologies can be applied to pre-modern Muslim societies to reveal the uses of the past and senses of tradition in diverse contexts of Muslim thought.

Tax collection has become highly complex and the system is creaking at the seams. Is there an easier way to collect taxes? This is the question raised by Rex Arendsen, Professor of Tax Law, in his inaugural lecture on 16 September.

The publication Making Matters - A Vocabulary for Collective Arts marks the end of the NWO project 'Bridging art, design and technology through Critical Making', led by Janneke Wesseling and Florian Cramer. The book contains the outcomes of this project.

Mariana de Campos Françoso and Amy Strecker published a new article in the International Journal of Cultural Property last week entitled 'Caribbean Collections in European Museums and the Question of Returns'.

The out of control ‘Project X’ event in Haren, hooligans who arrange to meet up to fight and beach riots at the Hoek van Holland: group violence is increasingly hitting the headlines. Are those who took part seasoned criminals? And what characteristics do group offenders have? PhD defence on 29 September…

The Central Asia project, funded by Asian Modernities and Traditions, has engaged in strengthening the Leiden University library collection in the areas of material culture, history, languages and geopolitics in Central Asia. UNESCO International Institute for Central Asian Studies (IICAS) and the Embassy…

The research presented in this thesis concerns one of the most important questions in software engineering of our time: how can we make sure that software is free from memory safety bugs?

Leiden University Libraries has made a large number of unofficial poetry journals from China accessible online in its Digital Collections. This opens up thousands of pages from an internationally unique collection of unofficial Chinese poetry for teaching, research, and the general public, including…

As terrorism scholars, we are intrigued by those who engage in violence. We study their motivations, tactics, ideology, organisational structures, and pathways to (de-)mobilisation, hoping to better understand terrorism and how we can counter it. Far less attention is paid to what happens after an attack…

Lise Stork, PhD candidate at LIACS, was interviewed by Mare about how to smartly digitise the collections of natural history museums.

For too long the Dutch collective memory has judged the Jewish Council too harshly. This perspective needs to be adjusted, Bart van der Boom argues in his new book ‘De politiek van het kleinste kwaad’ (lit. ‘The Politics of the Lesser Evil’).

Conference

Luca Giomi has the first results of his ERC consolidator grant. He discovered that epithelial cells move collectively but in different ways, depending on the scale you look at. It is hexatic at small scales, and becomes nematic at larger scales: it is a multiscale order. This collective movement of…

In the civil war in Syria, the country's cultural heritage is also under threat. There have been further acts of vandalism in Palmyra and many of the city's museums have been looted. Leiden archaeologist Olivier Nieuwenhuijse's Focus Raqqa project aims to make a digital inventory of the plundered archaeology…

On the 26th of February, 2018, it was exactly 25 years ago that the coins of ‘Verzameling Mr. B. Kolff’ were handed over to the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

Every year, the DIKTI-Leiden Fellowship programme offers three senior (postdoc) researchers affiliated with a state or private university in Indonesia the opportunity to conduct three months of research in the Leiden University Libraries (UBL) Special Collections.

Sara Polak, PhD researcher and lecturer at LUCAS, has won a Fulbright scholarship to work on her research on Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yale University from September 2014 till February 2015.

PhD candidate Vincent Walstra reflects on alternative social interactions and mutual aid in the city of Rotterdam during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Special visit of seven ambassadors of the Arabic-speaking world to the University Library

On 21 April 2022, Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski visited Leiden. The theme of his visit was the role of law and historiography in shaping collective memories.

The aim of this research is to investigate the informative potential of drawings and decorations in Italian secular cantata manuscripts from the seventeenth century.

Moot Court

A team of researchers from Young Academy and the Huygens ING/NL Lab has brought a three-century-old fragrance to life based on a recipe by Constantijn Huygens. The fragrance makes the past more tangible and can help people experience history differently.

A look into the political history of collecting and the collections of Andean mummies in Western European museums from 1830-1930 through archaeology and paleoimaging.

The people behind the Leiden University Libraries aim to maintain the level of their services to clients as much as possible. They are making thankful use of internet, but not everything can be put online.

This project investigates memorisation strategies that were employed in the fields of painting and calligraphy in imperial China, with a focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

What is the role of stress and stress-related hormones in emotion regulation?

The oral arguments at the Telders Moot Court are judged by a panel of three judges.