Last week, the Old Observatory Leiden concluded its participation in Stage 1 of the DOORS Incubation Programme. Our team has spent the last three months learning about how to successfully implement digital practices into their work to improve our audience engagement. The workshops introduced important…

With his dance routine and YouTube clips, he even manages to make grammar fun. His infectious enthusiasm and innovative teaching methods have won Thijs Porck, a lecturer in Old and Middle English, a nomination for the LUS Teaching Prize.

The DNA of young people is regulated to express the right genes at the right time. With the passing of years, the regulation of the DNA gradually gets disrupted, which is an important cause of ageing. A study of over 3,000 people shows that this is not true for everyone: there are people whose DNA appears…

To properly understand how babies absorb a language we need to study the process from a number of different perspectives, linguist Claartje Levelt argues. She accepts her appointment as Professor of Language Acquisition on 27 March with an inaugural lecture entitled ‘Language in its infancy’.

Bone remains that are thousands of years old are often too fragmented to be identified. PhD candidate Frido Welker is the first person to be able to distinguish human bones from one another on the basis of old proteins. PhD defence 18 May.

Tijmen Baarda defended his PhD thesis on 8 January 2020

The earlier you introduce children to a language, the sooner they can be captivated by it and see that there is more than just Dutch and English. That is the basis for the language lessons for primary education that Alisa van de Haar, university lecturer of French, collaborated on. ‘Deans from different…

Dr Jenny Doetjes was appointed Professor of Semantics and Language Variation in February. During her professorship Dr. Doetjes wishes to focus on charting linguistic patterns between languages that, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other.

After nearly 70 years, the Leiden Observatory has a new telescope. A crowdfunding action in March brought in the 20,000 euros required to build a solar telescope. On 19 September Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker officiated at the opening.

Yesterday marked the start of the National Accessibility Week. How accessible is Leiden University for people with a disability? We asked Lucia Langerak, disabled herself and working at the Honours Academy, about her experiences: ‘Significant improvements are being made.’

In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this project inquires: Which early modern vices persisted into the 19th century and to what extent were those vices embodied in anecdotes, conveyed through commonplaces, or symbolically…

This study analyses the prehistory of a northeastern Siberian population, the Sakha, from both a molecular-genetic and a linguistic perspective.

On Saturday 19 November 2016 the students (9 – 12 years old) and several parents of the Transvaal University visited the Leiden University College (LUC) The Hague. The aim of the visit was to get acquainted with several scientific issues in an interactive session.

How did a fifteen year old paper receive an award? It happened to LIACS professor Todor Stefanov and his colleagues. Their paper was awarded with the Test of Time Award, an international award for papers that had the highest impact over time. This paper in particular is about Daedalus, a framework used…

Leiden University has started the sustainable demolition of the old LCP building of the Faculty of Science.

HERLING (Research Lab for the Study of Heritage Languages of the Netherlands) is a new centre that aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and language communities.

In the Bachelor Honours Class ‘The Noble Art and Tricky Business of Translation’, Honours students learn about the tricky business of translation. To gain hands-on experience, students had to translate a poem for the seminar on poetry. For some translators-to-be, one language was simply not enough.

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

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Earlier this month, the Europa Institute organized an internal discussion on the German PSPP-judgment. For the first time, the German Constitutional Court declared acts of EU institutions as manifestly excessive and thus as ultra vires acts under German constitutional law. During an online debate, various…

Scientists from Leiden and Delft recently discovered old texts using X-ray radiation. The subject was reported in the English newspaper The Guardian.

The easy-to-learn programming language Hedy is a huge worldwide success. To develop the language further, Felienne Hermans, associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), started a crowdfunding.

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).

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

Recently, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) issued its second preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Following its earlier reference on the European Central Bank’s bond buying programme Outright Monetary Transactions, the German court now…

Moritz Jesse, Associate Professor at the Europa Institute in Leiden, provided the key-note lecture at this year’s annual conference of the German-Dutch Lawyers Association. The lecture was titled “The other’s amongst us – Third-Country Nationals and Brits in the EU”.

Environmental scientist Nadia Soudzilovskaia has been awarded the prestigious, international Bessel-Forschungs prize issued by the Von Humboldt foundation. This German award is issued to outstanding foreign mid-career scientists that collaborate with German researchers. ‘The combination of different…

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States.

Announcement

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history by analyzing contact-induced changes and using them to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred.

Language research generates a wealth of information about people: from our history and cultural differences to the way we learn. Leiden University shares its knowledge and passion for this topic via de MOOC on ‘Miracles of Human Languages’ and the web dossier on Language Diversity.

The Gouy-Chapman theory describes what happens near an electrode when it is in contact with a salt solution, but this description does not match reality. Researcher Kasinath Ojha, assistant professor Katharina Doblhoff-Dier and professor Marc Koper present a new version. ‘The next generation of textbooks…

To be eligible for German Literature and Culture at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

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.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

The winter season is almost here and so is the end of our exhibition More-than-Planet. From 1 November, you can only visit us with exclusive guided tours. During this tour, you will visit one of our historical telescopes and we will take you through the More-than-Planet exhibition.

On 2 December, Roel Becker and Joyce Esser, both PhD candidates at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law, gave a lecture for their colleagues and the students of Res Publica, the master’s association Constitutional and Administrative Law. In the lecture, they paid attention to the…

A new discovery proves that it matters which approach researchers take in analyzing large physical, social or biological systems that have a networked structure. Ever since the early 1900s, scientists have assumed each approach is equivalent. Now many results in statistical physics may no longer hold.…

Leiden University is demolishing a number of old laboratories of the Faculty of Science in a sustainable way. The Dutch Green Building Council, an organisation that seeks to ensure sustainable construction and demolition, awarded this approach four stars.

How big is the universe? How do stars form and evolve? And does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? These main questions in astronomy are the themes of the new exhibition Above & Beyond, which was created in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The exhibition…

For the first time in over half a century, one of oldest telescopes at the Leiden Observatory is getting a major improvement.

Silver jewellery, sculptures made of cork and intriguing photos of psychiatrists' treatment rooms. Staff at Leiden University exhibit their artworks in the Old Library. The summer exhibition can be viewed until 12 August.