Aleida Assmann


Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, who studied Egyptology and whose work has focused on cultural anthropology and Cultural and Communicative Memory.

Life

Born Aleida Bornkamm in, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, she is the daughter of the New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm and his wife, Elisabeth. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen from 1966 to 1972. In 1977 she wrote her dissertation in Heidelberg about The Legitimacy of Fiction. She had to take her minor field examination in Egyptology in Tübingen because her husband Jan Assmann had become a professor of Egyptology in Heidelberg.
In 1992 Assmann completed her habilitation in Heidelberg. In 1993 she became a professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz, where she remained to 2014. She was a visiting professors at Rice University in Houston, at Princeton University in 2001, at Yale University in 2002, 2003 and 2005, and at the University of Vienna in 2005. She was visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 2007.
Assmann's early works were about English literature and the history of literary communication. Since the 1990s her focus has been on cultural anthropology, especially Cultural and Communicative Memory, terms she and her husband coined and developed. Her specific interests is focused on the history of German memory since 1945, the role of generations in literature and society, and theories of memory.
Since 2011 she has been working on a research project titled The Past in the Present: Dimensions and Dynamics of Cultural Memory. This project summarizes in English her and Jan Assmann's work on cultural memory.

Awards

In 2014, she received the Heineken Prize for history from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, she was awarded the Balzan Prize for Collective Memory together with her husband Jan Assmann. In 2018, she was awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels together with her husband, honouring their work "sustainable peace and understanding among the peoples of the world".