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.

This Collaborative Research Group acts primarily as a platform for discussion of historical issues related to the African continent, its place in the world and in African Studies.

Geesteswetenschappen, Instituut voor Geschiedenis

How did African actors engage with the idea of Eurafrica?

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

The territories that would make up what is today the Republic of Zambia officially became British in 1891. However, this did not equate to an on-the-ground presence of colonial authority capable of affecting the destiny and daily lives of people.

This project looks at the ways in which youth in southern Nigeria navigate their lives in a context of experiencing long-term socioeconomic uncertainty and political insecurity (duress).

Africa has a population of 1.5 billion people. In 30 years’ time, this will be 2.5 billion. The continent’s impact on the global economy, but also on the environment, will therefore increase drastically.

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

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 at Leiden University is an advanced area studies qualification that combines world-class scholarship with practice-based learning.

Studievoorlichting, Online Experience

The research master's in African Studies at Leiden University is unique in continental Europe for the interdisciplinary range of subjects offered and the long-term fieldwork in Africa.

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

Kunst en vrije tijd, Kunst en vrije tijd

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?

Geesteswetenschappen, Centre for Linguistics

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…

Geesteswetenschappen, Instituut voor Geschiedenis

Papers presented at a colloquium, held in honour of Professor Dr. P.J.R. Modderman, Leiden, 3-7 May 1982.

This dissertation focuses on the overt marking of φ features encoded on perfective active auxiliaries in a group of Southern Italian dialects.

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

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…

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…

Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden

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

This book rovides an economic history of Portugal over the course of eight centuries, from 1143 through to 2010 and situates Portugal's economic growth within the context of European development. It also responds to fundamental questions about when, how and why the economy expanded, stagnated or co…

In ancient times, the steppe in the hinterland of Petra (Jordan) was transformed into a green oasis. This project tries to shed insights in the agricultural, water management and societal processes resulting in this transformation. This will be accomplished by practicing an interdisciplinary research…

Studievoorlichting

Colonial and Global History 1200-present explores the global circulation of people, goods and ideas during early-modern and modern times. Taking a comparative perspective, this program investigates the development of transnational and transcontinental connections and their impact on the making of identities,…

For thousands of years, societies have fallen under the reign of a single leader, ruling as chief, king, or emperor. In this fascinating global history of medieval and early modern dynastic power, Jeroen Duindam charts the rise and fall of dynasties, the rituals of rulership, and the contested presence…

The ASCL Research Programme for the years 2019-2024 is called ‘Strident Africa: Societal and Environmental Change in the Context of 50 Centuries of History’. It examines the dramatic changes taking place on the continent in terms of population growth, urbanization, the role of external actors and the…

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.

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…

Historical migration studies have long focused primarily on the European and Atlantic worlds. In this programmatic and long term project, we aim to broaden the perspective to include the full migration experience of the non-Western world.

The Leiden University Institute for History has a wide-ranging academic scope unique for the Netherlands. This is directly reflected in the participation of her staff in various Master's and Bachelor's programmes at Leiden University.

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

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.

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…

Lezing, Histories Connected: Work-in-Progress

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).

The Old Observatory has a rich history. On this page you will find a short version of the history that took place in the observatory.

This research programme 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…

Considering the ways in which the ‘global turn’ is changing the theory and practice of historical disciplines, Explorations in History and Globalization engages with the concept and methodology of globalization, challenging traditional divisions of space and time to offer a range of perspectives on…

This seminal volume covers the entire global history of urbanization since the rise of cities in Mesopotamia in the 6th millennium BC. Leiden historians Wim Blockmans, Leonard Blussé, Luuk de Ligt and Leo Lucassen contributed survey and thematic chapters.

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

Due to the fact that the Frisian lands lacked major political centers in the Middle Ages and also because most of its monasteries suffered complete destruction in the second half of the 16th century, relatively few written documents concerning medieval Frisian history have survived. To analyze them…