During the one-year master’s programme in Colonial and Global History you will learn about the importance of a comparative perspective for understanding transnational processes such as imperialism, colonialism, islamisation, modernisation and globalisation.

The final conference of the Eurasian Empires programme took place from 15 to 17 June 2016 in Leiden. The conference concluded a five-year research programme in which nine researchers worked on their own specific projects within the programme’s Eurasian scope, transcending borders by bringing together…

This year, NWO has awarded a Veni subsidy to 143 young researchers who have recently obtained their PhD. 17 of these researchers are at Leiden University and one works at the LUMC. The successful applicants will each receive 250,000 euro to develop their ideas and carry out research over a period of…

Dr. Bettina Reitz-Joosse, postdoctoral researcher in the Classics department has won Ted Meijer Prize of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR).

Last February, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) acquired a rare Chinese manuscript dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Three Chinese Studies students got the opportunity to decipher the edict (dated 1582) during their internships. In this UBLpodcast they share their findings.

Chemist Liubov Belyaeva, psychologist Janna Marie Bas-Hoogendam and LUMC researcher Elisa Giacomelli have received a Rubicon Grand and will therefore be able to conduct research at a top institution abroad.

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.

Recently the WTO panel report on India – Solar Cells (DS 456) was distributed. Under India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM), solar power developers were required to use certain types of solar cells and modules manufactured in India for power generation projects in order to ultimately…

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has granted four grants to Leiden humanities scholars. They get to spend this money on research on a topic of their choice, without thematic preconditions.

Associate professor Rens Tacoma has won the 2021 Research Prize for Historical Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Italy Studies Working Group for the best scholarly publication in the field of Italy Studies in Dutch or Flemish academia.

Prof. Dr. Ir. Marin van Heel, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Biology Leiden (NeCEN), is one of the winners of the “Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences 2017”. This annual award is presented to recognize contributions that have opened new fields of research or have advanced concepts in a particular…

Using the motto 'Exploring humanities through the life of objects' the Thingsthattalk platform gives a voice to historical objects that are usually kept behind closed doors. Objects from various Leiden collections are going to be made public and placed within a historical and user context.

The compulsory reading list is infamous among secondary school students, and for all the wrong reasons. This prompted the Faculty of Humanities and the Onderwijsnetwerk Zuid-Holland (South Holland Education Network) to launch the Alternative Reading List Award, in search of books that motivate young…

Not only the United States but also the Netherlands are faced with 'systemic problems' to do with racism and discrimination, according to Dutch Prime Minister Rutte during a press conference held on 3 June. The Prime Minister responded to the events taking place in the United States after the death…

Postdoc and linguist Evelyn Bosma receives the Keetje Hodshon Prize for her dissertation. For her research on the multilingualism of Frisian children, Bosma previously won the Klokhuis Science Prize and the Campus Fryslân Science Prize.

Adhesives are an incredibly important part of every day life. They help hold together everything from shoes and mobile phones to satellites in space. But we didn’t invent adhesives: Neanderthals did, to make handles for stone tools over 191,000 years ago. Leiden researchers now found that Neanderthals…

Het onderzoeksproject heeft als doel ouders te helpen hun kleuters gezonde eetgewoonten aan te leren door het bevorderen van sensitieve voeding tijdens de fase wanneer peuters kieskeurig met eten worden.

At one time, the railway from Kimberley to Kambove in Southern Africa symbolised prosperity and progress. Today, the exhausted mining towns along its route are marked by decay and pollution. Professor Jan-Bart Gewald has been awarded an NWO L grant to investigate the long-term global consequences.

For hundreds of years, children in Ancient Egypt learned to read using The Satire of the Trades, a text in which a father gives advice to his son through descriptions of different professions. PhD candidate Judith Jurjens investigated how this worked in practice.

Lecture

University Lecturer Nadine Akkerman concluded her book tour for her book 'Invisible Agents' in England at the Hay Festival. At the festival, attended by almost four thousand people, Invisible Agents was one of the most discussed books and caught the attention of the national newspaper and The Times.

Classical and Mediterranean archaeologist Tymon de Haas is a relatively recent addition to the Faculty of Archaeology. Succeeding Tesse Stek in September 2018, he has played an important role in teaching since then, working together with colleagues from multiple research groups. ‘I have my corner of…

On 26-28 June, 2023, Leiden University’s Institute for History will host a summer school on Socioeconomic diplomacy and global empire building, 16th-19th centuries, in collaboration with the N.W. Posthumus Institute (the research school for economic and social history in the Netherlands and Flanders)…

Martijn Bezemer has been appointed as professor in “Ecology of plant-microbe-insect interactions” within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology from the 1st of September 2016. His main research focus is on aboveground-belowground interactions.

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…

Dr. Gabrielle van den Berg received a prestigious VICI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for her project

Mike Schmidli recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in American History. He introduces himself.

The University of Copenhagen and Trinity College Dublin will become members of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) with effect from 1 January 2017. The LERU, of which Leiden University is one of the founders, aims to promote the interests of scientific research and teaching.

Welcome to 2024! I hope this message finds you doing well and reenergised following the holiday season. With that said, I can imagine that many of us are not quite ready to be back in the classroom (either as a student or a lecturer)! The good news is that we have plenty of activities to jump start…

The Indonesian Student Association in the Netherlands, ‘Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia Belanda’, has teamed up with the Indonesian embassy in The Hague and Historia.ID magazine to create an exhibition to mark the association’s 100th anniversary. The student association, which was founded in Leiden, played…

Floris Keehnen has been awarded the Volkskrant thesis prize 2012 for his MA thesis entitled:

Kaarle Wirta is one of the four PhDs in Cátia Antunes’ ERC Research Project 'Fighting Monopolies'.

An Honours Class about the ostensibly unrecognisable worlds of insular Southeast Asia teaches students a fundamental piece of wisdom:

Lecture, LIAS Lunch Talk Series

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the first publication of De jure belli ac pacis by Hugo Grotius in 1625, an international conference will be organized by the Grotiana Foundation, the Paul Scholten Centre for Jurisprudence at the University of Amsterdam, the Grotius Centre for International…

The aim of this project is to study the influence of Longinus’s treatise ‘On the sublime’ on practice and theory of architecture and theatre in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam.

The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

Beatrice Penati is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). Dr Penati will deliver a guest lecture on Monday, 10 October and a masterclass on Thursday, 13 October within the Central Asia Initiative at Leiden University.

This year, the Netherlands and China reflect on fifty years of diplomatic relations at ambassadorial level. How has the relationship between the countries developed over the past half century? An interview with university lecturer Vincent Chang.

PhD defence

The story of the iconic Silk Road is often told from the Chinese perspective. An exhibition at Oude UB focuses on the inhabitants and monuments of historical cities in Central Asia, a neglected part of the Silk Road. From 5 September to 17 October.

The idea that prejudices about the (Middle)-East came to be during the colonisation of North-Africa in the 19th century is false. Mounir el-Badri wrote a cum laude bachelor thesis about orientalist judgments with which 18th century slaves in Morocco much earlier characterised their captors with.

The Dutch research school IPA has awarded former PhD student Sung-Shik Jongmans with the IPA Dissertation Award 2016. In March of that year, Jongmans received his doctorate degree with the rare distinction ‘cum laude’, describing a new method for parallel programming. ‘I aim to simplify programming…

Dr. Tesse Stek has been awarded a Veni and a Free Competition (within the Humanities field) grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for his research projects.

On 15-16 June, Jos Gommans, Marieke Bloembergen, and Carolien Stolte will organize an international conference entitled “India in the Making of the Global Esoteric: 1200-2000”. The conference asks: why is it always India that has been imagined as a wonder, and what did that wonder mean, intellectually…

Archaeologist Victor Klinkenberg examined an old Assyrian settlement in Syria, near to the IS stronghold Raqqa. 'Social life was more important than military life.' PhD defence 27 October.

Predicting whether someone will fall ill and which treatment will benefit them most: that is the aim of the techniques that Professor of Analytical Biosciences Thomas Hankemeier and his research group are developing at Leiden University. In order to scale up and further develop this technology, he works…

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an exceptional two-volume Miao album. The acquisition was made possible by the Rombouts Fund for Chinese collections. The extraordinarily well-preserved work contains 70 full-page paintings on silk, depicting non-Chinese peoples in the area…

Arabist and papyrologist Petra Sijpesteijn has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for her research on the early Islamic Empire. The five-year ERC grant will fund the research project