In this unique collaboration between Leiden, Delft and Erasmus and building on the goals set in the African Union Agenda 2063 the United Nations Agenda 2030, this multidisciplinary minor fosters a deeper understanding of integrated and sustainable approaches in Africa.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

The African Studies Centre Leiden’s Research Programme for 2025-2029 is called ‘African Trajectories: Past Dependencies and New Directions’. Building on its former programme, it extends the recognition of Africa’s pivotal role in world affairs. The continent’s global significance has become increasingly…

Africa has a population of 1.5 billion people. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to 2.5 billion. The continent’s impact on the global economy, societies but also on the environment, will therefore increase drastically.

Africa is fascinating! In today’s globalised world, the continent plays an increasingly important role in international, social and cultural developments. Would you like to explore the many sides of Africa and its impact on the rest of the world, while also learning one of its languages? Our African…

The master’s in African Studies combines world-class scholarship with practice-based learning.

Study information, Online Experience

Are you thinking about studying African Studies? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

This collaborative research group (CRG) facilitates the synergies of researchers engaged with African languages and documentation of texts conducted in East Africa, paying particular attention to ‘endangered archives’ and ‘endangered languages’.

This project aims at studying the social media reception of African publications as covered by the most important “altmetric” sources.

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).

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

Published by Brill Nijhoff and written by leading experts including national judges, academics and practitioners East African Community Law is the first comparative as well as open access textbook on EAC law. The book provides a key resource for the research, teaching, and practice of EAC law. It also…

How do Central African refugees navigate through uncertainty in a new and hostile environment in the DR Congo?

In the last couple of decades an ‘animal turn’ has taken place in the social sciences. This has led to a call to study social issues by including non-human animal perspectives. This Collaborative Research Group thinks it's high time that African Studies joins the chorus of minds that try to contribute…

From the energy transition in Namibia to sustainable jobs for young Nigerians, from African cookbooks to vodcasts on vintage Swahili booklets: during a recent visit by the Executive Board, staff from the African Studies Centre Leiden and the African Library presented their research, teaching and acquisition…

Conference

In the South African context, certain iconic images have been a dominant source for public understandings of historical events. The emphasis given these images tends to overshadow the historical value of other more personal photographic sources – like studio or amateur photography. This project looks…

It is our goal to deliver a convenient, enjoyable, learning experience that goes beyond the basics. All of the apps are an initiative of the HANDS! Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies at Leiden University, as part of the Language Socialization in Deaf Families project funded by the Leiden University…

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.

This thesis focuses on the social dimensions of crane and wetland conservation in rural landscapes in Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Who is funding African science? How are different African and international funders interacting and contributing to develop scientific research in the continent? Are there potential inadvertent synergies among research funders that can be identified? These and similar questions are at the heart of this…

On the 27th of February, Marta Morgado successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Marta on this achievement!

On 13 January 2022, Pie Habimana defended the thesis 'Harmful Tax Competition in the East African Community'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. H. Vording and Prof. S.C.W. Douma (UvA).

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

This book celebrates Maarten Mous, professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University.

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?

Madeleine Hosli, Professor of International Relations at Leiden University, together with two other authors, wrote a chapter in Group Politics in UN Multilateralism. This chapter assesses the composition and functioning of the African Union (AU) within the United Nations.

How has interreligious encounter in Ogbómòsó created multiple religious belongings and identities among individuals and groups?

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Every month a member of the Institute for History tells about a book that inspired him or her. Afterwards, the pen is passed on to another colleague. This month dr. Meike de Goede tells about the book 'Between Tides' by Valentin Mudimbe. The novel, little known beyond the circles of Africanists and…

Promotores: H.A. Udo de Haes, H.H.T. Prins, Co-promotor: H.H. de Iongh

On 28 and 29 August, Dr. Ben Van Rompuy and Dr. Armin Cuyvers gave a two-day training to the Competition Commissioners of the newly established East-African Competition authority.

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.

As of 1 September Jan-Bart Gewald has been appointed as Professor of Southern African History in the Leiden Institute for History, in conjunction with the African Studies Centre, Leiden.

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…

The Rabobank has awarded Leiden University 50,000 euro for a ‘study-related' purpose. The gift is to be used to allow two African students to follow the research master’s programme in African Studies in Leiden.

What should a confederal constitution for the EAC look like? What are the legal challenges for making the African Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) work? And what insights can be drawn in this context from the successes and failures in the EU?

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

The project

In 1960, not one but 17 African countries became independent. Sixty years later the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) is offering a wide programme to mark this celebration. African Studies itself proved to be a topic of conversation at the kick-off conference on 30 January.

On 29 and 30 April 2015 the Leiden Centre for East African Law (LEAC) hosted its first Annual Conference in Kigali, Rwanda. The conference was organized in cooperation with the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) and compared integration through law in the EU and the EAC.

Professor Julia Sloth-Nielsen has received an A-rating from the National Research Foundation in South Africa, where she holds a Chair in Public Law at the University of the Western Cape.

An interesting Ottoman History podcast that deals with the slave trade and the African Diaspora in Ottoman Izmir.

Researchers from the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the University of Ghana are organising the first-ever pan-African summer school for deaf academics from the African continent (from 1 – 15 August).

African Studies is a field notoriously lacking in African scholars. Miriam Siun, research master student in this field, noticed this from the moment she started the programme. She decided to take matters into her own hands and hold a seminar reflecting on this issue.