This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

This research network aims to create a shared platform for debate and dialogue on the broader theme of cultural production and exchange across different area specializations and historical periods.

D.P. Kok defended his thesis on 10 October 2017

Vol. V, Sections 1-2

This PhD research aims to trace the impact of the Arab conquest, both immediate and long-term, on the material and social organization of Central Asia from 651 to 821 through an “urban change” perspective in four cities: Merv, Paikent, Balkh and Samarkand.

This project aims to revisit the ways in which religious minorities in the Middle East participated in, contributed to, and opposed the Arab nationalism of the post-war years, when the British and French ruled the region via the Mandates. Research question: How did religious minorities in the Middle…

The available tools for academic literature search return a list of ranked documents, which might not be ideal for some tasks. To facilitate these tasks, I am creating a visual representation of the academic search space where the user can browse academic topics.

The deeper understanding of an organism's pathology is important for developing treatments. Over centuries of systematic research, clinical researchers have demonstrated that the more information they acquire about the cellular properties and their organisation in the tissue, the better they can understand…

Practicum Artium (PA) is a programme specially developed for students of Leiden University with a talent for visual arts and an interest in artistic research. Art and research feed on one another and are intertwined in many ways. In Practicum Artium, you will explore artistic practices and methods,…

In a creative assignment as a part of the bachelor's course Visual Culture, students explored the impact and complexity of visual culture by means of visual culture. The resulting artworks were of such a high quality that it was decided to present these in an exhibition.

Leiden University is famous for its library’s large collection of Oriental manuscripts. Part of this collection is a group of 104 Arabic documents written on papyrus and paper (Or. 8264 and 12885). These documents date from the 7th through 10th century CE and cover a wide range of subjects (private…

To reach a larger audience beyond the academy, a number of activities in the cultural realm have been programmed over the years.

This project investigates how the first generation of Dutch printed books (the incunabula, 1473-1501) affected late medieval spirituality, religious practice and visual culture in the Low Countries.

Larissa Mendoza Straffon and colleagues investigated visual attentional biases toward self-made artworks, which tend to be favoured, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. Their findings confirm that attention and preference are higher for self-made…

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities…

Social and Behavioural Sciences, Political Science

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship? Want to learn more? Then sign up for the new MOOC…

This is a Special Issue of the peer-reviewed journal 'Social Sciences and Missions', which provides a forum for exploration of the social and political influence of Christian missions worldwide.

Located in the small Kingdom of Commagene at the upper Euphrates, the late Hellenistic monument of Nemrud Daǧ (c. 50 BC) has been undeservedly neglected by scholars

Deficiency of glucocerebrosidase (GBA) underlies Gaucher disease, a common lysosomal storage disorder. Carriership for Gaucher disease has recently been identified as major risk for parkinsonism. Presently, no method exists to visualize active GBA molecules in situ. We here report the design, synthesis…

Clara ten Hacken defended her thesis on 16 December 2015

In our research protein translocation from Agrobacterium into yeast and plant cells is studied to obtain fundamental insights in the translocation process

Morality, mathematics, geometry, geography, music, navigation, and language are traditionally viewed as uniquely human cultural achievements and abilities. The study of their development and variation is classified as part of the humanities and social sciences. These fields have been mainly studied…

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

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This article is aimed to shed light on the Swahili-‘Ajam ī manuscripts, focusing on the major Swahili classical genre: the

Vulnerability and the associated levels of social resilience is what fascinates the researchers at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. What links a Japanese fisherman after the tsunami at Fukushima with a Ghanaian goldminer in an increasingly industrialised work environment?…

Building a Deep Cross-media Transfer Network to extract visual relations that relieve the problem of insufficient training data for visual tasks.

A core interest of our cluster members concerns processes of reception, transformation and (interlingual and intermedial) translation in medieval and early modern art, literature and media from diachronic and synchronic perspectives (in time, space, and between media).

Aesthetic formations and cultural repertoires give meaning to our reality in ways that are never neutral. Focusing on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its global interlocutors, this project brings together a team of scholars from Leiden University who bring in inter-disciplinary, inter-area…

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Subproject of

Over the past decade, several novel types of spatially resolved

Thanks to its early civilisation and continuous mix of influences, the Muslim world has a rich and varied culture. The study of material culture, books, stories, films and increasingly television series teaches us about the structure of modern-day Muslim societies.

Cultural anthropology development sociology, visual methods, policy in practice, global ethnography.

The fourth volume of Ex Novo has the pleasure to host Heleen van Londen, Marjo J. Schlaman, and Andrea Travaglia as guest editors of the special issue titled The Natural and The Cultural. Integrating Approaches in Landscape Heritage Management. This timely collection of peer-reviewed papers and short…

Religion, Philosophy, and the Pre-modern World

If, as the works of John Cage suggest, there is “no such thing as silence,” then what are the markers that show us we are experiencing silence? - what are the performative cues during musical silence? - what are the auditory and visual bookends of silence in performance, i.e. what anticipates and…

What is the iconography of propaganda specifically as it relates to the historical development of political ideologies in modern Egypt and how was/is this propaganda disseminated among creative fields such as cinema, art, monuments, architecture, and literature?

During the Autumn semester (September-December), the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) offers a minor that focuses on the study of Morocco from a social sciences and humanities perspective.

Research on papyri has provided new insights into the history of the origins of Islam. Petra Sijpesteijns’s book,'Shaping a Muslim State', is based on these ancient Arabic letters and documents. Her new research on a Viennese collection of untranslated papyri is expected to produce more discoveries.

Dina Ishak Bakhoum defended her thesis on 21 January 2021

Since the end of the nineteenth century Arabic book designers have influenced the social and cultural situation in the Middle East with their work. Huda Smitshuijzen Abi-Farès has written the first global overview of this neglected field of science. PhD defence 10 January.

The international bachelor's programme in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology covers three years, allowing you to establish a firm foundation and specialise in topics that you find interesting.

This project aims to identify, quantify and map the exposure of Dutch national monuments to four climate change effects: flooding, waterlogging, drought and heat.