Meet the team and our partners.

The platform Bridging Humanities was established in 2017 as a partnership between LeidenASA, Brill Publishers, the Voice4Thought Foundation, and Africa Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL).

The idea for the journal originates from the Voice4Thought Foundation, itself an outcome of the research project ‘Connecting in times of Duress’ lead by Prof Mirjam de Bruijn. V4T is a foundation that acts as an online academic-artistic platform that aims to experiment with co-creation and digital technology to offer a space for positive socio-political change. It believes academia should make use of the possibilities offered by digitalisation and be opened up (‘brought to the streets’) to collaborate with other knowledge producers, artists in particular. As one of their focus areas V4T experimented with e-publications – next to e-blogging, e-arts, e-learning and e-projects – on their website.

V4T established contact with Brill publishers, a reputable publishing house in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It was felt that the e-publications on their website deserved an academically recognised space for publication. Brill recognised the possibilities of the new trends in publishing and was willing to formally these publication in Open Access. An agreement was signed for this between V4T and Brill, establishing Bridging Humanities as an independent publication platform. The journal remains in content closely related to the aims of V4T.

LeidenASA, a network of Africanists based at Leiden University, was willing to fund the position of an Editor-in-Chief to help build the journal from September 2017 for a year. The Advisory board of LeidenASA consists amongst others of members of the ASCL and LU Africanists.

Publications about Africa are encouraged but the platform does not restrict itself to this field of area studies. Bridging Humanities as a platform can help connect different groups of Africanist researchers from all levels in and outside Leiden University.