Simon Portegies Zwart, professor of Computational Astrophysics, uses computers to simulate the evolution of stars. We speak with him about his field and about the challenges of working with huge amounts of complex data.

What is the effect of practicing with electronic books on reading skills for grade 1 students?

LUCL is pleased to announce that Professor Johan Rooryck has been awarded both an NWO Horizon Grant for his project entitled 'Knowledge and culture', and an NWO Vrije Competitie Grant for his project entitled 'Lend me your ears: the grammar of (un)transferable possession' for a total of €2.75m.

Professor Johan Rooryck will be examining cognition and core knowledge systems and how possession is expressed in different languages. Rooryck and fellow researchers have been awarded two NWO grants totalling 2.75 million euro to carry out two research programmes: 'Knowledge and Culture' and 'Lend me…

Lecture

The MA Media Studies consists of four different programmes in the fields of Journalism and New Media (Dutch taught), Book and Digital Media Studies, Film and Photographic Studies and Cultural Analysis: Literature and Theory.

In his PhD research in the field of public administration, Mark Reijnders looked at why people do not receive the help they need. They lose their way in the labyrinthine support system or become bogged down in bureaucracy. In public administration this is known as non-take-up of social care. PhD defence…

To address the relevance of Christianity to the ideological negotiations with the officially established authority, this research will be conducted by asking how the history enthusiasts negotiate the Christianity-related ideology through reconstructing the Christian past and reproducing religious histories…

Student and Educational Affairs

Three enormous maps of China, created during the reign of three different emperors of the Qing dynasty, have now been made available in open access and are downloadable via Leiden University Libraries’ (UBL) Digital Collections. The rich maps are an early example of academic collaboration between the…

On 23 February 2022, Cale Davis defended the thesis 'Prosecutorial Discretion in International Criminal Justice'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. C. Stahn en Dr. J.C. Powderly.

After 41 years, Meindert Danhof, Professor of Pharmacology, is leaving the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research on 31 March. A symposium in his honour, prior to his farewell lecture, will show what has been achieved in this period. Danhof takes a look back on his career.

National Meat Free Week (Nationale Week Zonder Vlees, 7–13 March) is an initiative to reduce meat consumption. Assistant professor Paul Behrens is studying what impact a change in our food consumption would have on the world. What, according to him, are the main reasons to switch to a (mainly) plant-based…

PhD Defence

Lecture

Gerrie Lodder has published an article in the Dutch legal periodical Nederlands Juristenblad on the exploitation of labour migrants from the perspective of human rights.

Lecture, Seminar

On 21 and 22 March 2019 the workshop 'Criptic Identities. Historicizing the identity formation of persons with disabilities across the globe' takes place at the Leiden Institute for History.

Subproject of

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Spring 2014

Between July 13 and 16, 2022, Leiden University will host the ESOF conference. The EuroScience Open Forum is the largest multidisciplinary scientific conference in Europe. Artists can attend the conference with a reduced entry rate.

How do people become involved in terrorist organisations? Liesbeth van der Heide sought the answer to this question in a Malian prison, where she interviewed terrorists in a tiny cell. She discovered that the will to survive and social context are often more decisive than individual ideological convictions.…

Rent Subsidy is a tax refund provided by the Dutch Government, to people who rent a room or a house but don’t have a sufficient income. The rooms in the Anna van Buerenplein qualify for rent subsidy. Students may get around €150-€170 monthly, depending on the apartment size, the rent amount, and the…

This project is aimed at 1) elucidating the role of attention in itch and pain, including orientation, and attentional disengagement (i.e., directing attention away) from itch and pain; and 2) modifiability of these attentional processes.

The 'language analysis interview' on the basis of which the Immigration and Naturalisation Department attempts to determine where an asylum-seeker without any documents comes from, does not meet the criteria of reliability and validity. Joachim Detailleur, student of Arabic, substantiates this statement…

Research on the morality of life insurance. What issues are raised when insurance companies define responsibility and solidarity? Has insurance changed since the crisis of 2007?

This project employs a systematic experimental approach to examine the interaction of these two hitherto independent lines of research (tone sandhi and focus realization) in six dialects of Chinese, which lie on a continuum between dialects with dense tonal distributions and sparser distributions. In…

This project will explore how Chinese digital networks are grounded in real-world institutions, and how interest groups and individuals use digital infrastructures to shape public discourse on national history.

The Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is to appeal against a recent court ruling on the Public Access to Government Information Act (Wet openbaarheid van bestuur, WOB). The court ruled that the way in which the Ministry handles WOB requests was not in accordance with the law.

In the world of Ancient Greece the interpretation of supernatural signs was a versatile tool to facilitate decision-making. This is the central hypothesis of the PhD dissertation of historian Kim Beerden. Defence on 14 February.

Lecture, Leiden Interdisciplinary Migration Seminar (LIMS)

Lecture

PhD Defence

This subproject offers a political and transnational perspective on the development and uses of public memories of the Revolt in the seventeenth century.

Materials that are built up from individual granules exhibit a special phenomenon called ‘jamming’. With research into the nature of this phenomenon, a team of scientists led by Leiden physicist Prof. Martin van Hecke has made it to the cover of the prominent journal Physical Review Letters. ‘Jammed…

On Wednesday 13 December at 16.15 hrs René Hage will defend his doctoral thesis entitled ‘Handhaving van privaatrecht door toezichthouders’ (Enforcement of private law by regulatory authorities) at the Academy Building of Leiden University. His supervisors are Professor Jaap Hijma and Dr Iris Houben…

How do you ensure that research is performed, evaluated and managed in a responsible way? This question is also of the utmost important to the University itself. The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) studies scientific research and its relationship with technology, innovation and soci…

How do inclusion and exclusion affect people?

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. We have a solid typology of gender systems, yet exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or threaten to cross the outer…

Lecture

This subproject examines the development of memory cultures, the meaning of memories of the Dutch Revolt, the multimedia aspect of the creation of a local memory culture, which artefacts were used to keep memories alive and the differences between local memory cultures in the Repubilc and the Southern…

Debate, Integration Chatroom

Van Vollenhoven Lecture

How do insurance products transform intimate and personal relations? What are the consequences of the classifications that insurance companies use and how do these affect solidarity, morality and inequality?

Climate change is made up, the secret services murdered Pim Fortuyn and JFK, and the moon landing was a fake show. Conspiracy theories are of all times, providing sensation and entertainment, but also unrest and fear. The corona pandemic is new fuel for conspiracy theorists who set fire to 5G masts,…

Nietzsche may well have criticised Spinoza, but even so, the two philosophers had more in common than we might think, according to young Romanian philosopher Razvan Ioan. PhD defence 1 November.

Lecture, Workshop

In the Phenomix Medical Delta Field Lab, which was officially opened on Thursday 9 July, scientists, healthcare institutions and businesses work together to develop innovative applications in the field of metabolomics. This research field makes it possible to determine which drugs will be effective…

In the largest study of ancient DNA ever conducted, an international team of scientists has revealed the complex story behind one of the defining periods in European prehistory. The study is published this week in the journal Nature.