Staff members
Our Team
The Institute of African Studies has always been characterized by a multidisciplinary approach to the study of Africa. It unites social and economic history, sociology and philosophy of language, linguistics, political science, ethnology and sociology of development in a comprehensive study program.
Institute management
Staff members
ohter members
Prof. Dr. Edlyne Anugwom
- visiting professor
ongoing project: Informality, Vulnerability and Precarity as Social Conditions of Existence in the Neoliberal Age: Evidence from the North and South.
The study investigates precarity and informality as realities of social existence of citizens in the global North and South. While labour precarity may exist as a reality of employment/engagement in the informal sector, it is also reminiscent of larger conditions of existence which includes not only the employed but their dependents and significant others. In effect, the study interrogates the orthodox economic narratives of precarity as solely related to the realities of the typical workplace. Though the discourse of precarity has been dominated by emphasis on labour, I intend here to investigate precarity from a largely social perspective with emphasis on informal sector workers and the impact of informality on the social conditions of their families and relations. But while there may be different drivers of informality in different global contexts, the process may embody precarity and thus call attention to the need to empirically identify these drivers and the related experiences of precarity as definitive of social conditions of a good number of citizens. Therefore, equally undergirding this study is the goal to unravel the extent to which the notion of social precarity can be privileged to capture both the labour conditions in the informal sector and the larger determining influence of neoliberalism on the broader conditions of existence of members of the society.
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Dr. PD Geert Castryck
Geert Castryck is a historian with special interests in spatial and postcolonial approaches to history, memory and identity, and the production and transfer of knowledge. Spatially, he has focused primarily on East and Central Africa, on transregional entanglements in the Indian Ocean world and between Africa and Europe, and on urban areas. Thematically, he has worked on questions of imperialism and colonization, colonial legacies and decolonization, Islam and Swahili urban identity, and peace and remembrance education.
He is currently a private lecturer at the Faculty of History, Arts and Area Studies at Leipzig University. He has been affiliated with Ghent University (1999-2006, 2015-2016, and 2025), the Flemish Peace Institute in Brussels (2006-2010), Leipzig University (since 2010), and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2023-2025), complemented by research stays at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford (2022), and teaching assignments at the Université Nationale du Burundi, Bujumbura (2012), and the University of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia (2016-2018).
He received the degree of Doctor of History from Ghent University (2006) and his Habilitation, with venia legendi for the history of the 19th to 21st centuries, from Leipzig University (2022). Furthermore, he holds a master’s degree in Oriental Studies (Islam/Arabic and Judaism/Hebrew), a history teacher degree, and the Saxon Higher Education Didactics Certificate.
Ongoing research projects include an entangled history of colonialism, decolonization and globalization, a spatial reading of colonialism and imperialism in Africa and Europe, an exploration of urban citizenship, and a postcolonial history of peace.
Dr. Rachel Muchira
Rachel Muchira is a researcher in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, with a focus on multilingualisms and language pedagogy. She has taught in the German Studies Sections of Moi University (2012 - 2022) and the Technical University of Kenya (2023 – 2024). She is also a Goethe-Institut certified teacher and examiner of German as a foreign language for the levels A1 – C2 and is a member of the steering committee of Subsahara-Afrika-Netz DaF Digital (SANDD)
She joined the Institute for African Studies in October 2024 as a lecturer and researcher for among others Swahili Linguistics, Postcolonial Theory, and Research Methods and is currently an Associate Researcher working on projects on decolonizing epistemologies, language practices, and pedagogies.