As Lila Abu Lughod pointed out in 1989, North Africa has been one of the geographical ‘zones of prestige’ for the development of canonical approaches and crucial theoretical debates regarding the comparative study of Islam.

Sea-ing Africa explores how infrastructure in Ghana and Morocco shapes development, blending geopolitics, economics, and culture, impacting local and societal dynamics.

The emergence of new players on the world market such as India, Brazil, China, Turkey and the Gulf States gives Africans more choice in who they work with and under which terms. At the same time, African multinationals are choosing to work with regional partners and are thus furnishing old political…

The authors in this volume explore how external innovations (products, technologies, services, institutions and processes) have been appropriated in African societies in order to be acceptable and relevant to local conditions, expectations and demands.

Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence, and Environment, vol.16. Edited by Noriyuki Shirai.

Global health governance is at a crossroads. As the world reckons with the existential threat of planetary crises (climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution), international policy frameworks struggle to keep pace with a rapidly changing landscape in global health and public health.

English The purpose of this research is to identify and examine the challenges faced by African States in the field of foreign investment with a view to contribute not only to the academic debate, but also to foster awareness and develop the capacities of these States with regard to the drafting, negotiation…

How do speakers adapt to multilingual contexts?

Team History of Africa and the Americas

The Great Rift Valley in Africa is a real treasure trove for discovering early human fossils. The fossils found in this part of Africa have determined our view of human evolution. But was the Great Rift Valley really the place where evolution took place or just a place where fossils are well preserved…

This project investigates the causes of the major archaeological change in the period of 40.000-20.000 BC in South Africa.

The studies outlined in this volume explore how connectedness continues to change Africa and how Africa continues to shape the social life of connections.

VODAN Africa started as a platform to enable access to critical data needed from Africa to fight the novel COVID-19. The initiative was inspired by the experience from the Liberia Ebola Virus outbreak in 2014: early detection requires contact tracing. Inclusion of the most vulnerable is critical to…

The Leiden University Network for Health in Africa (LUNHA) aims to shift the focus of global health to be more about justice, fairness, and inclusion.

Like any language, the natural sign languages (henceforth: SLs) of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that SLs make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

Research combining a conceptual and practical perspective within the field of teaching and learning second languages.

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

History of Africa and the Americas

This monograph by Robert Ross provides a detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century.

Studying one another’s languages and cultures fosters understanding between groups of people, which leads to more equality, along with increased economic, administrative, and cultural cooperation.

Languages spoken around the world differ vastly from  the more familiar Indo-European languages. The courses in this theme aim to introduce you to the immense linguistic diversity still found in the world today. 

Like any language, the natural sign languages of deaf communities differ from each other in their grammars and lexicons. A growing number of studies indicates that sign languages make use of the gestures of hearing speakers to build linguistic structure. This implies that variation and similarities…

This research project seeks to understand the dynamics in the relationship between social media, mobile telephony and the social fabric under duress in Africa's mobile margins. It combines studies on mobility/migration, conflict and communication in an attempt to uncover these new dynamics, which have…

The aim of the project is to contribute to the process of archive formation ongoing in Post-Apartheid South Africa through the inclusion of photographs that have been either unacknowledged or excised from the national canon.

From the smallest level of interaction among families and close friends, over the meso-level of schools, shops, churches, religious communities and companies, to the highest level of nation-states and international organisations: Language Policy and Planning (LPP) is everywhere!

This project aims at providing a broad perspective of the state of Science Technology and Innovation (STI) in Africa with a focus on global funding flows, in order to inform research funders in the continent, in particular those participating in the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI). The project…

In this book, Lydie Cabane examines the history of disaster management in South Africa.

The present investigation aims at exploring whether the instruction provided at secondary schools in the capital meets the requirements of Communicative Language Teaching and whether the aims of improving learners’ communicative proficiency are met.

This project will study the influence of Arabic, Iberian, and Italian representations of Africa, as well as the impact of local African knowledge, on Dutch imaginations which were public in nature, and thus affected a shared European understanding of African alterity.

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

This programme starts from the idea that cultural discourse is one of the main engines of intellectual history and the history of ideas.

At LUCL, researchers have established the Leiden Hands!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies.

Africa is seen as a potential leader in green hydrogen production for domestic consumption, export and greening industry. One key barrier to realising this potential is the mismatch of skills between those required by industry and the capability of local workforces.

This project creates a comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the Sanye language, the sociolinguistic situation, and cultural practices of the Sanye (Dahalo) community in coastal Kenya.

In recent years, and especially since the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, a growing body of research, media reporting, and scholarly literature has focused on the role of ‘Arab youth’ as the drivers of social and political movements across the Middle East and North Africa.

The ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as

This project explores how Muslim authorities and writers use Russian to transmit Islamic contents, and whether this leads to a specific

This project investigates how sign languages change and spread over time, and how this is influenced by their transmission history.

This research profile area brings together descriptive, historical and theoretical linguistics, as well as psycho- and neurolinguistics.

On the 6th of January, Kefan Bao successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Kefan on this achievement!

Southern Africa has a rich tradition of social history, one inspired by the tumultuous changes that have regularly convulsed the region from the 1780s onwards. Scholars have always sought to understand what these changes meant for everyday life and emphasised a perspective of marginal groups, how these…