Sara de Wit is a lecturer at the Institute for History.

More information about Sara de Wit

Trained in cultural anthropology and African Studies, Sara has long-term fieldwork experience in southeast Madagascar, the Bamenda Grassfields in Cameroon and Maasailand in northern Tanzania. By carrying out multi-sited ethnographic research, she has explored how globally circulating development ideas and technologies – such as climate change and weather forecasts - ‘travel’ to different African contexts, and what happens when different worlds of knowledge and expertise meet. She studied these broad themes at the intersection of environmental anthropology, history and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

For her PhD research (University of Cologne), she has carried out fieldwork among the semi-nomadic Maasai in northern Tanzania to explore how they make sense of climate change and this new discourse. In 2017, Sara joined the Institute of Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS, University of Oxford) as a postdoctoral research fellow. She has been part of the Forecasts for Anticipatory Humanitarian Action (FATHUM) project, in which she explored how climate scientists and humanitarians construct and negotiate ideas of success of humanitarian anticipation ahead of disasters (Mozambique, Uganda and South Africa). Her work has been used by the Red Cross Society and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA). Furthermore, Sara has carried out a history of the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene sector (WASH), for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which has informed the Lancet Commission on WASH.

In 2023, together with two other newly appointed Assistant Professors, Miriam Waltz and Sheila Varadan, Sara has launched the LUNHA Hub (Leiden University Network for Health in Africa). LUNHA wants to create a broader space for social sciences and humanities in discussions about global health in Africa. By collaborating with various partners, including civil society, policymakers, and academia in Africa, LUNHA seeks to lead critical discussions and change the direction of global health research beyond biomedical epistemologies, towards more inclusive approaches that include planetary health and issues of justice and rights.

Fields of interest

• climate change;
• Cameroon;
• Madagascar and Tanzania;
• gender;
• development;
• weather forecasts and anticipatory humanitarian action;
• global health and justice;
• knowledge encounters.