On 1 December, Kate Ekama delivered the keynote address at the Emancipation Day commemoration in Pniel, Stellenbosch. Drawing on her archival research, she traced the lives of enslaved people who secured freedom for themselves and their families, illustrating how rigorous historical work can recover individual stories and connect the archive to contemporary social justice debates.
Ed Kerby delivered the opening keynote at the African Economic History Network meetings on behalf of Johan Fourie, who could not attend the meetings. The talk – Make African Economic History great again – was well received.
On 4 November, Meredith Paker presented the 10th annual LEAP Lecture. The title of her talk was: Understanding the Past with Machine Learning. The LEAP Lecture was delivered at the end of the a workshop on economic history in the age of AI. Caterina Chiopris and Emily Aiken were the keynote speakers.
LEAP has two candidates on the economics job market: Gabriel Brown and Tim Ngalande. Gabriel is a postdoctoral fellow whose job-market paper on Bible translations in Africa combines an extraordinary new dataset on missions, language and infrastructure with state-of-the-art identification to show how vernacular codification shaped colonial investment and long-run education and health. Tim has just submitted a PhD that builds new twentieth-century data for South African mining and manufacturing and uses growth accounting, structural modelling and quasi-experimental evidence to quantify how apartheid’s labour and transport institutions misallocated talent and imposed large productivity costs.
LEAP is advertising five postdoctoral fellowships for 2026. If you’re on the economics job market, with an interest in economic history and developing regions, please consider applying!
LEAP received Stellenbosch University’s interdisciplinary research award in October 2024. Prof. Sibusiso Moyo, Vice-Rector for Research, highlighted LEAP’s impact, noting its strong local relevance and global reach.
