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

How do speakers adapt to multilingual contexts?

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…

The Dutch Michelle Sweering became the best math girl in the world at the International Mathematical Olympiad in South Africa. She is the only girl who won a golden medal.

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

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

The researchers in the World Archaeology department of the Faculty of Archaeology concentrate on a range of different periods and regions: from humanity’s origins to the Middle Ages and the modern age, and from Asia to South America.

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

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?

Africa is online. Leiden Africa expert Mirjam de Bruijn is fascinated by the fast development of mobile telephony and social media in Africa. She maintains a website on the topic, focusing on isolated, marginalised and conflict-ridden areas in Middle Africa.

Peter Bisschop is Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is a Sanskritist and cultural historian of ancient India, with particular interest in the development of Hinduism and related traditions. His research is philological in…

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

David Ehrhardt studies governance and institutional change in Africa, with a focus on the role of non-state leaders (such as traditional and religious leaders) in promoting changes that enhance development. He is also co-lead of the Learning Mindset innovation project, which develops and researches…

AI has huge societal and economic potential and is widely used. But it also brings challenges: how do we combine human values with AI, how do we make AI more transparent and understandable, and what can AI and human cognition learn from each other, for example about language learning?

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

How can theories about modern disinformation help to understand how Roman documentary fictions functioned?

In the BA African Studies you will gain in-depth knowledge of Africa and the specific theme of your choice. At the same time, you will develop valuable academic and digital competences, as well as personal skills.

The project GRADIENTS investigates what it meant to be European in colonial Africa where identification as European often did not depend on skin colour and was understood on a spectrum with many gradients.

On Wednesday 11 October 2017 the African Studies Centre Leiden and the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society are organizing a workshop.

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…

Lettie Dorst is an associate professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She teaches a range of different courses in the Minor Translation and the MA Translation, including courses on Translation Studies, Translation Technology, Multimodal Translation and Subtitling. Her research focuses…

Keiko Yoshioka is a Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies and Head of the Japanese language programme. She specialises in Japanese language and second language acquisition, with a focus on Japanese language pedagogy, multimodal interaction—especially gestures—Japanese ideophones,…

Researchers have the whole world as their work area. Dutch researchers collaborate with Chinese, Australians give lectures in Lithuania, Koreans move to America and back. Who can contribute to academic knowledge, who benefits from it and who pays for it? A fair and effective system for this has not…

Rogier Creemers is a Lecturer in Modern Chinese Studies. With a background in Sinology and International Relations, and a PhD in Law, his research focuses on Chinese domestic digital technology policy, as well as China's growing importance in global digital affairs. He is the principal investigator…

Matthijs Westera is an assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.

‘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.

Walter Gam Nkwi is Assistant Professor at the Institute for History.

Knowledge of Muslim societies is essential to function in a globalised world and to fully understand our own Dutch society. Leiden researchers explore the languages, cultures, religions, legal systems and history of Muslim societies and in this way contribute to a centuries-old tradition.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

Priscilla Lam is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. As part of the Melody in Speech project, Priscilla’s research investigates the prosody of tone languages. She examines the interaction between tone and intonation systems with a focus on West African languages, namely…

What are the rights of migrants in Morocco and how do this receiving state and migrants deal with them in practice?

Dr Michael Kerschner is Senior Guest Researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology. Parallel to this position he is a research associate at the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and responsible for the research focus “Cult and Sanctuary” there. His main field…

How geographical and institutional openness in Dutch Guiana fostered a unique colonial economy. This publication is part of the Early American Places Series.

Despite the wealth of historical literature on the Second World War, the subject of religion and churches in occupied Europe has been undervalued.

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.

Was the progressive colonial civil servant the precursor of the postcolonial development-aid worker?

Casper Wits is a University Lecturer in the Institute for Area Studies. His research focuses on postwar diplomatic and international history in East Asia, with a special interest in the development of Chinese and Japanse foreign policy and Sino-Japanese relations in this period. He also takes an interest…

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…

Alisa van de Haar is Assistant Professor in historical French Literature. Her research focuses on historical multilingualism, the history of the language sector, and the intersection between language and migration. From 2022 to 2026, she conducted a Dutch Research Council Veni project titled ‘Languages…

What are the conditions under which coercive diplomacy can compel a State to abandon its controversial nuclear (weapons) program? Based on the experience of the US coercive diplomacy against the nuclear programs of three countries, namely Iran, Libya and South Africa, Jean Yves Ndzana’s PhD research…