Daniëlle Baan is a student from the Netherlands, striving for a career in research on authoritarian politics, armed conflict, mass violence, and transitional justice. She is completing an MA in International Relations: Global Conflict in the Modern Era with a thesis on the Korean War-era massacres by South Korea, alongside an MSc in Law and Society. She holds a BA in International Studies, with a focus on East Asia and learning Korean. As part of her bachelor’s degree, she spent a semester studying at Dongguk University in South Korea. In her free time, she likes to cook, crochet, and explore the Netherlands, marvelling at things she would otherwise take for granted.
Eline Balster is a resMA student in Arts, Literature and Media at Leiden University. In her academic writing, Eline is driven by an interest in the cultural traces left by technological systems on contemporary society. (Put less formally, she is often captivated by things to do with the digital, data, and death.) Her research engages with short film and poetry through spectral close readings, is generally informed by the humanities as well as by science and technology studies and always employs a distinctly personal tone. Currently, Eline is writing a master’s thesis on the shadowed histories of water infrastructures in the Netherlands.
Patrīcija Bauze is an MA student in Linguistics, specialising in Computational Linguistics. After completing her studies in Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, she initially went on to pursue her interest in speech recognition but later became intrigued by large language models and their behaviour. Now she finds herself surrounded by natural language processing, statistics, and model evaluations, but still enjoys an occasional task involving speech processing. Alongside working on investigating dangerous behaviours in large language models for her thesis, she enjoys improving her coding skills and learning more about logic and psycholinguistics. In her free time, Patrīcija enjoys painting and drawing, a good, long walk around her neighbourhood and expanding her knowledge on flowers.
Simona Bizunovičiūtė is a resMA student in Arts, Literature and Media at Leiden University, with a background in French Philology. Her work begins from the overlooked: minor gestures, habitual routes, and fleeting encounters that structure everyday life. Moving between literature and visual culture, she combines textual analysis with practice-based creative methodologies, focusing on how urban space is perceived, recorded, and narrated. Simona’s MA thesis traces narratives of stalking, following, and pursuit, drawing on Blanchot, Derrida, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine the relation between tracing, deferral, and textual production. Approaching research as a form of following — of ideas, images, and signs — she explores how urban imaginaries are produced and distributed, asking how visibility is organised. Her work attends in particular to the thresholds where presence slips into absence, and where questions of precarity, exclusion, and knowledge emerge from everyday life.
Zuzia Dzierzędzka is an MA Book and Digital Media student. In her article she addresses space through its ability to be constructed with sound. Sound-created environments meet at a cross-section of her passion for music making and her academic interest in literary ecologies within the field of environmental humanities. Equipped with that, she tackles soundscapes and their properties within Orwell’s 1984. Being able to conduct research from a new perspective about a book equally over-analysed and relevant till today is something that really excites her in her research. Her creative and academic work inform one another as she has presented her poetry at the conference at London Art Based Research Centre, and her work is currently exhibited in the Queer Underground exhibition in Amsterdam.
Katharina Eder is in her second year of the resMA Linguistics, having previously studied in the UK and Italy. While she is interested in almost all areas of language and communication, she is currently focussing on German-based urban youth language. This includes research on varieties spoken in Germany, as in her contribution to this journal, but also her MA thesis, which revolves around the speech styles of young people in Vienna, Austria. The aim of her research is to demonstrate that young people are not, in fact, ruining language, but that they are the most creative speakers our societies have. Apart from her academic interests, Katharina is an avid reader, loves to try out niche sports (most recently: Aerial Acrobatics!) and attempts to battle the Dutch wind on her bike.
Stephanie Lones is a second year resMA Arts, Literature and Media student. Coming from her experiences as a disabled student, she is particularly interested in all things disability studies with her preference being medieval disability studies. For LEAP, she used her own embodied knowledge to uncover the medieval mystic Margery Kempe’s disabilities. As part of LEAP, Stephanie was a member of the PR-team in which she wrote social media posts and organised and photographed the symposium. When she is not cutting down the number of words for her article (she has a habit of going over the limit), Stephanie can usually be found drinking a cup of tea and reading a book or two. Her other academic interests include postcolonial studies and dolls. Stemming from her hobby of collecting dolls, Stephanie is part of a research group of scholars working on American Girl dolls and their material culture.
Roberto Ochoa is a Mexican scholar with a bachelor’s degree in law and a previous master’s degree in political philosophy. He worked at the Universidad La Salle and the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos in the Mexican southern city of Cuernavaca. He studied for several years with Jean Robert, the architect and philosopher about whom he writes in this issue of LEAP. Based on his previous master´s thesis, he published a book in Mexico titled Muerte al Leviatán. Principios para una política desde la gente (Death to the Leviathan. Principles for a people-centred policy). He arrived in the Netherlands 7 years ago to live with his Dutch wife and their two Dutch children. Now he is doing his first year of the resMA in Philosophy with specialization in Law, Politics, and Government at Leiden University.
Farah Pahlevan is a German-Iranian master’s student of International Relations and Crisis and Security Management. She has a BA in International Studies where she specialised on the Middle East and her main areas of interest are resistance movements, particularly in Iran, and studying societies in conflict, especially those where the distinction between war/peace is not so clear cut. When she is not studying or working as a language teacher, she runs a book club that she co-founded, where each month they read a silly or not so silly book by a female author. She also loves reading and writing almost as much as talking (about books and in general).
David Sary is an MA student in International Relations: Culture and Politics at Leiden University. He holds a Bachelor in Humanities from the Paris Nanterre University and first came to the Netherlands as an exchange student in Amsterdam, where he became enamoured of several aspects of the Netherlands. With his paper, he is trying to reconnect with his Cambodian roots and better understand his family. In his free time, he enjoys cooking for others, playing Lacrosse, and reading.
Matthijs Verzijden is currently writing his thesis for the resMA Asian Studies on Hakka mountain songs in Taiwan, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between September 2025 and January 2026. His contribution to LEAP explores how space for Hakka culture and identity is crafted and contested in- and outside Taiwan through singing and listening to these songs. Beyond, he takes interest in Taiwanese and Chinese languages and cultural expressions, the question of how making and listening to music connects people, and the interplay of language, culture, and identity. One day per week, he works in secondary newcomer education in Rotterdam, teaching Dutch to children from China and other Mandarin-speaking countries. In the time that remains, he likes to play drums and percussion, cycle and walk shorter and longer distances, and work in a community veggie garden.