The ASCL has moved to the new Humanities campus!

The African Studies Centre Leiden has moved from the Pieter de la Court building, to the Herta Mohr Building in Leiden in the last week of May! We are now located at the former P.N. van Eyckhof-Van Wijkplaats, Witte Singel 27a in Leiden. You are very welcome to come and visit us!

The African Library is now open to visitors every Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00, in this beautiful new building.

The building houses a number of other academic institutes and libraries that focus on different regions in the world: 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; and the Faculty Office of the Faculty of Humanities. Read more about the new humanities campus here. 
 

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.