The current and future board of F.D.L. Gibalaux, the study association of the French language and culture programme, talk about the association, the change of board, their experiences and plans.

Dutch and Flemish partners, including Leiden University, are joining forces as the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) in the fight against the spread of fake news, and have received the support of the European Commission.

Vice-Rector Simone Buitendijk doesn’t believe for a single moment that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are just hype. This is what she said on 13 March at Campus the Hague’s InspirationLab on ‘Open Education’. Buitendijk wants Leiden University to be at the leading edge. ‘MOOCs and online innovation…

‘It is a fantastic sum of money,’ enthuses classicist Professor Ineke Sluiter. ‘It gives me not just an award, but a task as well. And in all honesty, I prefer it that way.’ She is already brimming with ideas about what she will do with her Spinoza Prize.

Who will win this year’s Teaching Prize in the Faculty of Humanities? Who will the students honour with this coveted token of their appreciation? Read on to get to know four passionate teachers – about minds working at top speed, experimental teaching styles and that satisfying moment when the penny…

Aafje de Roest turned her hobby into her job. She went from a teenager who enjoyed listening to hip hop music to a PhD candidate who focuses on how Dutch hip hop music shapes the cultural identity of young people in the Netherlands.

FactRank is a new online tool that automatically detects ‘checkable’ claims made by politicians in parliamentary debates or tweets, and therefore enables fact-checkers to work much faster. Alexander Pleijter, a researcher and lecturer in Journalism and New Media, helped develop FactRank.

Young people are more likely to find long texts unappealing to read, particularly with all the digital distractions. To improve young people’s reading skills, Elise Swart and Hannah De Mulder are starting an innovative study to make reading fun again.

On 21 March 2024, the ‘learners’ at Wolfert Bilingual in Rotterdam were not teenagers, but some 180 teachers and teacher educators from around the Netherlands and beyond. Those delegates were bound by a common interest in exploring and engaging with teaching and learning in linguistically and culturally…

For a long time it was thought that there were few or no female spies in history. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In her book Invisible Agents, Nadine Akkerman reconstructs the stories of the many British women spies in the 17th century.

Can Zebra finches learn to distinguish two very similar Dutch words? Research by behavioral biologist Verena Ohms proved that they can identify 'wit' and 'wet'. Ohms published her findings in

‘It is a fantastic sum of money,’ enthuses classicist Professor Ineke Sluiter. ‘It gives me not just an award, but a task as well. And in all honesty, I prefer it that way.’ She is already brimming with ideas about what she will do with her Spinoza Prize.

What do you get when you combine traditional storytelling, new technology, and a whole lot of creative passion? Sumak Kichwa Wawa, an Andean children's storybook using augmented reality, that's what! Assistant professor, Martine Bruil and researcher Ximena Buller Machado tell us more about this special…

Every year diplomatic representatives of Latin American countries, researchers and students come together during a conference of the GRULAC region group. This year different researchers talked about their work during a visit to the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs in The Hague.

Four lecturers from Leiden University will receive a 50,000-euro Comenius Teaching Fellow grant. This will enable them and their team to realise an educational innovation within their own teaching.

Mariana Françozo has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. With this 1.5 million euro grant Dr. Françozo and her research team will investigate the transformation of the knowledge of diverse Brazilian indigenous peoples into a body of knowledge that became part of the Western…

Alumna Minke Lok (26) programmes many announcements in various languages at almost all major airports in Europe, including at Schiphol. ‘Millions of people around the world hear what I create.’

Rob Goedemans (52) is an information manager at the department Information Management and Facilities (IFZ) and member of the crisis team. He is involved in facilitating and providing information about distance learning. We asked Rob how he is helping our faculty through this hectic period.

How can initiatives aimed at environmental conservation and climate change mitigation in the eastern Himalayas proceed from the cultural expectations of its indigenous ethno-linguistic minorities? Enabled by an NWO Open L grant, the research project 'Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation…

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Lecture

Many of our staff and students have won prizes over the past year. Others have been awarded a subsidy, or, because of their eminence in their field, they have been appointed member of an academic society or have taken on a position in the community. Reasons enough to be proud of them and to include…

Leiden University is awarding an honorary doctorate to virologist Marc van Ranst. Van Ranst has been one of the main advisers of the Belgian government during the Covid pandemic. German Arabist Beatrice Gründler will also receive an honorary doctorate for her work in the field of Oriental Manuscript…

The Humanities Faculty bachelor’s degree programmes in History, and Greek and Latin language and culture were rated by students as the best. The master’s programmes in Classics and Ancient Civilisations, Dutch Studies and North American Studies also received the highest scores. These were the results…

Nadine Chahine, designer of Arabic typefaces and external PhD candidate at Leiden University, has been named in Fast Company's 2012 ranking as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. ‘I see type as the means to engage in the larger context of culture and society,’ commented Chahine.

America will not be choosing the next President until 8 November. Nonetheless, election fever is already running high. University lecturer and political commentator Kees Boonman explains the phenomenon and shows what Dutch politicians can learn from it.

Last July saw the start of the new master programme Cosmopolis Advanced, an initiative of the Institute for History at Leiden University in partnership with Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta. The Cosmopolis Advanced programma, led by prof.dr. Jos Gommans and coordinator dr. Lennart Bes, provides…

On Thursday July 1, our alumna Lise Stork will defend her PhD thesis at Leiden University. It is about using AI to make sense of handwritten natural history archives.

On 8 December, Leiden University Press will present a new international series on Persian poetry and literature. The series will be edited by Asghar Seyed Gohrab (Middle Eastern Studies).

Biologists Michelle Spierings and Ryan Bogaars will both join the Dutch Final of the FameLab Competition on April 21st in Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.

The South African poet and author Antjie Krog gave the 37th Albert Verwey Lecture in the Great Auditorium in the Academy Building on 18 November. Inspired by Verwey’s poem ‘De zegger van verzen’, Krog’s lecture was a polyphonic and multilingual love letter to poetry.

A study in the Behavioral Biology group of Carel ten Cate at the IBL showed that experience-dependent and -independent preferences influence song learning in zebra finches.

Biologists Michelle Spierings and Ryan Bogaars are 2 of the 4 winners of the Leiden heat for the international FameLab competition in talking science during a public presentation.

Dr. Corey Williams (Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Global Christianity) has received a Collaborative International Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion. This initiative is intended to support generative research collaborations between and among scholars located in different…

Spirits play a important role in post-colonial and minority literature as a means of processing black pages from history, according to literary scientist Chia-Sui Lee. PhD defence 11 January.

Will Leiden be the first city to have wall poems in sign language? It will, if sign language researcher Victoria Nyst has her way. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Leiden Language Museum and the TEGEN-BEELD Foundation.

While humanities once mainly involved books and archives, nowadays we can’t imagine life without AI. Next semester a new faculty-wide course will be introduced, taking you along with this development. University lecturer and course coordinator Yann Ryan tells us more about it.

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

Leiden University offers one full Leiden University Excellence Scholarship (LExS) to an African candidate interested in the two-year Research Master African Studies programme (ResMA AS); thus non-EEA/non-EFTA* applicants. LExS is a prestigious scholarship and includes a fee waiver up until the statutory…

On Saturday 11 May 2019, the BA South and Southeast Asian Studies programme held an Alumni Event for former students. All current students and staff were also invited. Several alumni were invited to talk about their study and career during two panel sessions. An inspiring afternoon!

On February 2nd, 2018, Professor Sven P. Vleeming of Trier University was presented with a ‘Festschrift’ to celebrate his retirement last summer. The book was presented to him, in the presence of friends and colleagues from the Netherlands and abroad, by the editors: his former Leiden colleagues Koen…

Florian Schneider has earned the title of Leiden University Lecturer of the Year. Sinologist Schneider was nominated by his students and crowned winner of the LUS Teaching Prize at the opening of the academic year by the board of the Leiden University Student Platform (LUS).

On Monday 23 November, Ms Simonetta Cook, member of the Cabinet of the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, addressed master's students following the LLM European Law Programme. She shared valuable insights on what it is like working for the European Council, in addition to some of her…

On February 28th of this year Dr. Andrzej Tadeusz Antczak died of cancer after a long battle. Until his retirement in 2023 Andrzej was attached to the Faculty of Archaeology as an Associate Professor in Caribbean Archaeology. From 2017 until 2020 he was the Head of the Department of World Archaeology,…

On the second floor of the Sylvius Laboratory, new labs are being built for researchers of the Faculties of Social and Behavioural Sciences and Humanities. After a successful tender construction has recently started.

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

What holds people together and what makes them willing to fit within larger political structures? Our project examines this question in the practices of dynastic rulership in Eurasia ca. 1300-1800.

Inaugural lecture

Nineteen researchers who have recently been awarded their PhD are to receive a Veni grant of up to 250,000 euros. Science funding agency NWO has awarded a total of 158 Venis in this round; Leiden University's share of the awards is 12 percent.