News & Events

Looking for Christmas presents? The ASCL online bookshop offers 50% discount on all used books until 20 December 2016. On offer are e.g. historical books on South Africa, the African Writers Series, poetry of Elisabeth Eybers, biographies on Ian Smith and Morgan Tsvangirai, and studies on religion, land reform, economics and politics in many African countries. Visit the ASCL bookshop, use the discount code SO2016.

The new exhibition at the ASCL consists mostly of graphic work and is initiated by Studio Kurtycz. From 2008 until 2015, Studio Kurtycz was located in West Africa, developing projects in interaction with the local population and local artists. Subjects related to gender, migration, tolerance, corruption and uniformity. The exhibition can be seen on the 3rd floor and in the ASCL library (ground floor) in the Pieter de la Court building.

The ASCL Library has just published a bibliography of Stephen Ellis (1953-2015), who was an extremely productive researcher: Ellis published some 20 books and more than 130 scholarly articles. The bibliography starts with an introduction by Jos Damen (head of the ASCL Library) and contains a list of publications: books, articles & book chapters, book reviews, blogs, press articles and interviews. Suggestions for the revised edition of 2017 are welcome.

The Call for Papers for the 7th European Conference on African Studies (Basel, 29 June-1 July 2017) is open! Scholars in African Studies are invited to propose papers to the panel(s) of their choice. This year's theme: 'Urban Africa - Urban Africans: New encounters of the rural and the urban'. Deadline for submitting abstracts: 19 January 2017. We made an overview of the Leiden related panels.

Prof. Jan-Bart Gewald and Leonor Faber-Jonker have contributed to the exhibition 'Le premier génocide du XXe siècle: Herero et Nama dans le Sud-Ouest africain allemand, 1904-1908' in Paris. The exhibition deals with the genocide on Herero and Nama in German South West Africa (current Namibia) at the start of the 20th century. Leonor Faber-Jonker is scientific curator of the exhibition, Prof. Gewald has made his archive available and gave a lecture at the opening of the exhibition on 24 November 2016. 

The links between conservation and livelihood concerns remain much debated, and there is no agreement about the degree to which these concerns are linked, and how they should be tackled together. The main objectives of the PhD dissertation by Michiel van den Bergh are to uncover the local values of birds, the environment and conservation for rural people in Burkina Faso’s Sahel region, and to increase insights into interventions that aim to achieve integrated (migrant bird) conservation and sustainable development objectives in this area.