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…

This book is about the workings of networks of the mobile in Africa, a continent usually associated with the ‘global shadows’ of the world.

This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations.

COUNTERRR examines domestic responses to jihadist armed groups in Africa, analyzing variation in state repression, community resistance, and the evolution of security across Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

This study seeks to partially fill the knowledge gap about national culture in Africa, basing its research on data on ethnolinguistic groups (instead of administrative regions).

While African ground-based air quality measurements have struggled to gain national and continental footholds, satellite data, especially high-resolution measurements from the TROPOMI satellite, can provide not only continental coverage but lend new insights for regional to city-scale air quality issues…

Leiden University investigates biodiversity not only in the Netherlands, but also abroad, with the goal of improving global nature conservation. We do so in collaboration with local universities. Education is also high on our agenda.

The project Multimedia Research and Documentation of African Oral Genres: Connecting Diasporas and Local Audiences (Director: D.Merolla) focuses on multimedia as technology that allows scholars to share documentation and scientific knowledge with the cultural owners of the collected oral genres.

On 10 november 2021, Carmel van Niekerk-Jacobs defended the thesis 'Realising the right to reproduce with assistance in South Africa'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.J. Sloth-Nielsen and Prof. T. Liefaard.

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.

What categories exist in the languages of pastoralists? Do these semantic concepts reflect universal or languagespecific tendencies? What (environment? culture?) governs the similarities (or the differences) attested crosslinguistically in cattle colour systems?

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Catherine O'Regan will deliver the annual Van Vollenhoven Lecture

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…

Combining approaches from intellectual history, philology and the study of Arabic manuscripts, this study places the Bornu scholar Muḥammad al-Wālī within his intellectual environment on the one hand, and it portrays him as someone who responded to the concerns of ordinary Muslims around him on the…

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

African oral literatures, new media and technologies: challenges for research and documentation

Promotores: G.R. de Snoo, B. Sinsin, Co-Promotor: H.H. de Iongh

Early Childhood Community Practitioners’ analyses of new mother’s challenges in Alexandra Township South Africa: a collaboration between academics and practitioners

The Leiden African Studies Centre (ASCL) will become part of the University from 1 January 2016.

In the media, we hear a lot of worrying news from Africa: refugees, attacks, Ebola, starvation, corruption... But Africa is much more than that: it is a continent in transition, with developments occurring at breakneck speed. African Studies scholars from different academic disciplines in Leiden conduct…

This project aims to systematically investigate the influence of information structure on nominal licensing in a subset of Bantu languages.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. Smets, Co-promotor: T.R. van Andel

Leiden University will deepen its cooperation with knowledge institutions in Africa. During a trip to Ghana, a delegation spoke with several African knowledge institutions about intensifying their collaboration.

Leiden Asia Centres

There are over 7,000 languages in the world and over half of the world’s population is bilingual. But how do all these people use their language? And how do these languages differ from one another? Under the slogan of ‘Interconnecting linguistic diversity,’ the researchers from the Leiden University…

This systematic review of 68 English-language articles explores the roles of customary authorities in environmental governance in sub-Saharan Africa

North Korean workers designed and built numerous monuments, museums and other buildings in southern Africa. This is clear from research by history student Tycho van der Hoog for his master's thesis. These monuments can be an important source of income for a country that has become quite isolated on…

Leiden University and four other Dutch universities will appoint 51 PhD candidates to conduct solution-oriented research for and with the African continent.

Chad-born youngsters in Paris come into contact with youngsters actually in Chad via Facebook: it would be difficult to find a better way to demonstrate the possibilities social media offer for people scattered across the world by war. Mirjam de Bruijn has been awarded a Vici grant for a study of the…

NCLUDE is an independent think-and-do-tank working to make knowledge count for inclusive development in Africa. Combining rigorous research with knowledge brokering to bridge the gap between evidence and action, INCLUDE's overall goal is to produce knowledge, share it widely, and help others use it…

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…

Leiden University has a long and outstanding tradition in the field of public international law.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

At the end of March, the first coronavirus infections were detected in southern Africa, which resulted in country after country rapidly closing their borders. Tycho van der Hoog witnessed this process at first hand during his PhD research in Namibia. He analyzes the state of the corona crisis from his…

‘Can he do it?’ Since the remarkable victory of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 Nigerian presidential elections, this has arguably been the most frequently posed question in Nigerian politics.

Former President Kgalema Motlanthe of South Africa gave a public lecture on Campus The Hague on 7 July. His story was about the economic transformation of Africa.

The jury of the Africa Thesis Award is delighted to announce that the 2024 prize has been awarded to Baleseng Maeneche, a graduate of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, for her thesis 'Media Representations of Male Perpetrators of Violence against Women and Children:…

The Leiden Leadership Centre is a member of the Global Leadership Centres Roundtable (GLCR). The Global Leadership Centres Roundtable is the international network of university-based leadership centres.

Africa needs a narrative that is consistent with the developments that are taking place all around the continent. In these developments, talented youth, creative tech hubs, and leapfrogging play a big role. We need to invest accordingly.

If you are from abroad and you want to work at Leiden University, there is quite a lot to arrange.

Language connects us! We are here to help you! The Academic Language Centre (ATC) is the language centre of Leiden University. As the oldest university language centre in the Netherlands, we offer language courses in a wide range of languages, both for beginners and advanced students. All courses are…

Combining a job with a PhD Dual PhD programme

Leiden University Centre for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) is housed in the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University.

Fieldwork is a crucial part of the learning process for students in the Faculty of Archaeology. This includes both fieldwork aimed at collecting archaeological data and materials as well as fieldwork for heritage studies. The Faculty has established a specific centre of expertise to further shape these…