Investigation of 1.) The whereabouts of the epistemological dissonances in art criticisms on Post-war contemporary art from Japan between two different language realms, in this case in English and Japanese; and 2.) What the dissonances disclose, disturb, and contribute in the process of the establishment…

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

Leiden-Yale collaboration uncovers a tale of samurai same-sex love in a library manuscript.

Rebecca Tompkins defended her thesis on 21 March 2019

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

One of the ways of understanding another culture better is to examine what people experience when they read a text, or look at an image. Leiden experts have a lot of knowledge in this field, for example on culture in ancient Japan.

Andrew Littlejohn published the article 'Ruins for the future: Critical allegory and disaster governance in post-tsunami Japan' in American Ethnologist about the ruins left by Japan's 2011 tsunami.

On 1 September 2022 Afke van Ewijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Ruobin Han defended her thesis on 21 March 2017

On the 28th of September Go Hirasawa successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This book project explores the changing dynamics of marriage and family life in postwar Japan based on an examination of the life histories of single mothers.

Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion, and the Arts Volume 87 in the series Religion and Society

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

This dissertation is the first comprehensive description of Makalero, a language spoken by approximately 6,500 speakers in the Iliomar subdistrict, in the south-east of the Republic of East Timor. While previous sources considered it to be a dialect of the larger language Makasae, the present study,…

Tijmen Baarda defended his PhD thesis on 8 January 2020

This book presents an in-depth grammatical description of Kumzari, a mixed language spoken in remote villages on the Musandam Peninsula in northern Oman.

The Laiseang archiving project ensures the preservation of unique records of languages in the region which have been gathered by more than two dozen linguists at, and in collaboration with Dutch universities over the last 40 years.

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

In the specialisation in Modern Languages you will explore the structure, acquisition, history and use of one or more of these five languages in depth: Chinese, English, French, German and/or Italian.

Friday 25 April 2025 | Leiden University Institute of Security and Global Affairs – The Hague

Attitudes towards cultural heritage have long been characterised by an ‘endangerment sensibility’ concerned with preventing losses. Recently, however, critical heritage scholars have argued that loss can be generative, facilitating the formation of new values and attachments. Their arguments have focused…

This project investigates the effects of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953) on the production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food in transwar Japan and Korea.

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

Chinese Linguistics at Leiden University offers you an excellent opportunity to benefit from our long-standing expertise in Chinese linguistics

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

On the 17th of January, Sarah Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Sarah on this achievement!

This project aims to uncover a series of sites of difference and innovation. In particular, it locates itself in two kinds of distancing: geo-cultural (ie. in the non-European space of Japan) and medial (ie. in innovative expressive media).

Conference

This edited book presents case-studies and reflections on the role of languages and their analytic study in development practices across four regions: Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific.

Paul van der Heijden, professor emeritus International Labour Law, was recently appointed by the British Minister for Trade as an independent arbitrator under the dispute settlement provisions of the United Kingdom’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Japan.

This proposal aims at the construction of a comprehensive and authoritative scientific grammar for Dutch and Frisian in the form of a virtual language institute: het Taalportaal/the Language Portal.

I am Nargess Asghari. I came to the Netherlands in 2017 to study Linguistics at Leiden University. I wrote my pre-master’s and master’s theses on Iranian Sign Language and Berbey Sign Language (an emerging family sign language in the village of Berbey, Mali), respectively, under the supervision of Dr.…

It is our goal to deliver a convenient, enjoyable, learning experience that goes beyond the basics. All of the apps are an initiative of the HANDS! Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies at Leiden University, as part of the Language Socialization in Deaf Families project funded by the Leiden University…

The present investigation aims at exploring whether the instruction provided at secondary schools in the capital meets the requirements of Communicative Language Teaching and whether the aims of improving learners’ communicative proficiency are met.

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation.

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.

The ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as

Like any language, the natural sign languages (henceforth: SLs) of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that SLs make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…