News & Events

The African Studies Centre's Annual Report for 2015 is out now! In 2015 we finalized preparations to become part of Leiden University as an interfaculty institute. It was also the year in which we lost our most successful researcher, Professor Stephen Ellis. You can read the Annual Report online; printed copies will be available soon.

The Coutinho Collection consists of about 1250 photographs (negatives and slides) taken in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau in 1973 and 1974 by the Amsterdam and Utrecht professor and microbiologist Roel Coutinho. Coutinho donated the collection to the African Studies Centre Leiden, which had the photographs digitized and “donated” them to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons license. 

Commissioned by the Food & Business Knowledge Platform, this scoping report aims to contribute to a more contextualized comprehensive picture of The Netherlands’ government's ongoing cooperation with West Africa and the perspective in terms of policy options for strengthening its effectiveness and coherence by giving more emphasis to the promotion of intraregional trade and investment. 

Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi died on 29 June at the age of eighty-two. He was among the first generation of African writers and novelists, and most of his work was published in the famous, now classical, Heinemann African Writers Series, which has also become available as an online resource (restricted access).

The 7th European Conference on African Studies, organised by AEGIS, wiil be held 29 June - 1 July 2017 in Basel. The conference theme will be 'Urban Africa - Urban Africans: New encounters of the rural and the urban'. How do urbanization processes in Africa transform conventional objects of African Studies and how do scholars of Africa gear up to face such changes? This is the question which the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland wishes to invite scholars of Africa to engage with. Deadline: 18 August.