We are thrilled to be launching our new-look AEGIS website. Aiming to enliven the interface itself, and substantially enhance both internal and external communication, the site has been restructured, important information updated, and a number of new features added. The latter include: Teaching, News, Events and Opportunities, and a monthly Spotlight on one of the AEGIS members. We hope you’ll find much here to inform you and inspire you to connect to the wealth of African Studies activities and resources within Europe and beyond.
At the start of her AEGIS Presidency in 2019, the current President, Amanda Hammar (CAS, Copenhagen), identified the need for a new AEGIS website as one of her priorities. It took some time until work on this project could really begin, and it then became clear just how much work it would entail. Developing the new website necessarily has been a highly collaborative process. It began with the setting up of the AEGIS Visibility Working Group (VWG) in late 2020, when COVID made it especially clear that new and more active forms of communication both among AEGIS members and with the wider community of African Studies scholars was needed.
The VWG consists of eight members from seven AEGIS institutions. It has worked intensively over the past few years to develop the strategic, substantive and practical aspects of the new website, in consultation with the AEGIS Board and Plenary. The core development work has been supported part-time over the past year by our incomparable (and sadly temporary) Website and Communications Coordinator, Alice Troy-Donovan, while the technical design and website mastering has been in the competent hands of Harro Westra at ASC Leiden.
While we are extremely proud and delighted to have launched the new website, inevitably it is a ‘work in progress’. We will continue to pay attention to its current limits and the need for adjustments and additions as AEGIS itself develops. As a mater of routine, the website will require occasional updates of relevant pages from all the AEGIS members as well as Collaborative Research Group Coordinators, ECAS and Summer School organisers, the AEGIS-Brill Series editors, and so on. But it will also rely on a range of ad hoc inputs across the board regarding news, events and opportunities in order to sustain a dynamic, relevant and user-friendly website.