The ASCL will move in 2024!

The African Studies Centre Leiden will move to a new building within Leiden in May-June 2024. The ASCL offices will move in the last week of May, followed by the library in the first week of June. The library will most probably be closed both weeks.

The name for the new building, formerly referred to as 'Cluster Zuid', was announced on 1 February: it will be called the Herta Mohr Building - the first time a Leiden University building has been named after a female scientist. 

Egyptologist Herta Mohr (1914-1945)

Herta Mohr, born in 1914 in Vienna, took subjects in Egyptology and African Studies at the University of Vienna. In the late 1930s she moved to Leiden with her parents, presumably because of political developments in Austria. In Leiden she studied Egyptology, with a particular interest in a mastaba (burial chapel) at the National Museum of Antiquities. Mohr was able to finish a book manuscript about the mastaba before she was arrested and deported to Westerbork concentration camp in 1942. According to official sources she died on 15 April 1945 at the age of 30 in Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Dean Mark Rutgers said about the naming of the new building after Herta Mohr that it symbolises the recognition of the ineradicable academic contribution made by this exceptional Egyptologist.

Humanities Campus

This is the third project in the redevelopment of the entire Humanities Campus of Leiden University. The building will house a number of academic institutes and libraries that focus on different regions in the world. It is the former P.N. van Eyckhof-Van Wijkplaats near the Witte Singel.

The institutes that will move there are:

• The African Studies Centre Leiden and the African Library
• The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
• The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS);
• The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO);
• The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV);
• The Middle Eastern Library
• LeidenGlobal
• Faculty Office of the Faculty of Humanities

Latest news

• Dedicated website about the new Humanities Campus
• The ASCL offices and library are expected to move to the new building in the last week of May, continuing into the first week of June. Classes will be given in the new building from September 2024. More precise dates, including expected closing weeks of the library, will be announced on this page. 
• Announcement of the name of the new building: Herta Mohr Building (1 February 2024)
• Photo report of the current state of the new building (15 January 2024)
• Read more about the new building.