New visiting fellows at the ASC

Five research fellows are currently visiting the ASC: Romain Dittgen from Luxembourg, Nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe from Israel, Daniel O. Spence from South Africa, Felix Kaputu from Democratic Republic of Congo and Moses Mwangi from Kenya. Romain Dittgen is the first joint fellow at the African Studies Centre and the International Institute for Asian Studies, also in Leiden. Read more about this joint fellowship programme here.

Romain Dittgen holds a PhD in Human Geography at the Sorbonne University in Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and is an associate researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). His research deals with the spatial dimension of the Chinese presence in Sub-Saharan Africa. His focus is on settlement dynamics of public and private Chinese actors through an enclave perspective.

Nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe’s research interests are (African) NGOs and civil society, African asylum seekers and their organizations, environmental NGOs and the relations between policy, NGOs and daily lives. Since October 2013 she has been a research fellow at the Davis Institute for International Relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Daniel Owen Spence is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, and holds an Innovation Scholarship with the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He is an imperial and transnational historian working on the 19th and 20th century maritime history of the British Empire, addressing i.a. issues of racial identity, imperial discourses of power and colonial navalism.

Returning visiting fellow Felix U. Kaputu from D.R. Congo has for the last seven years worked in different academic institutions in America, Japan and Belgium. He focuses on comparative structures that put African experiences on the one hand, and other continents (Asia, Europe and America) on the other, for global comparative presentations.

Moses Mwangi, also a returning visiting fellow, holds a PhD in Water Engineering from Loughborough University, UK. He is interested in sustainable livelihoods development and management, particularly for the arid and semi-arid lands environments. He holds the Chair of the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources Management in the South Eastern Kenya University.