Eefje Gilbert is a research master student in African Studies at Leiden University. For her Master’s thesis she takes a look at networks of (dis)connection surrounding the new deepsea harbour in Kribi, Cameroon. For this research project she spent four months in Cameroon during the rainy season 2013 and the two following months interviewing Dutch stakeholders and researchers in The Netherlands.

Eefje holds a Bachelor’s degree in African Languages and Cultures from the University of Leiden. During her Bachelor’s research project she spent five weeks with the ≠Akhoe Hai//om in Tsintsabis, Namibia. ≠Akhoe Hai//om is a Khoisan language of which many speakes have maintained an unusual cultural profile as hunter-gatherers. Her research focused describing the colour world of the ≠Akhoe Hai//om. She gathered data with tools provided by the Language and Cognition Departement at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. You can read the thesis here.

Throughout her studies Eefje has always held student assistant positions, both at Leiden University and at the Max Planck Institute. She also worked as a student assistant to the Connecting in Times of Duress research project where she was responsible for integrating e-humanities into the project. This rather frustrating endeavour has led her to develop  new ideas on how and where to go from humanities research as it stands right now to its digitalised counterpart. In July 2013 she gave a presentation on this topic at the European Conference for African Studies (ECAS) in Lisbon, with a follow up in December 2013 when Prof. Dr. Mirjam de Bruijn and Eefje addressed these issues and ideas to the Institue of History. You can look at this presentation here.

Her main research interests lies in understanding and connecting different world views and ideologies. This ranges from hunter-gatherer and sedentarised societies to academics and 1^st generation internet citizens.