Susanne Gehrmann studied languages and literature in Bochum, Paris, and Cologne, completing her doctorate in literary studies in 2001 at the University of Bayreuth. Since 2011, she has been a professor of African literatures and cultures at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she teaches postcolonial anglophone and francophone literatures from Africa and the diaspora. She has been a Feodor Lynen Fellow at Université de Laval in Québec and a fellow at the Academy for Advanced African Studies in Bayreuth. Her current projects focus on the intellectual exchange between Nigeria and the négritude movement during the 1950s and 60s, particularly in connection with the journal Black Orpheus (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), and on representations of violence in Congolese literature (DFG). She is co-editing a literary history of Africa (Metzler) and serves as the academic director of the Janheinz Jahn Archive.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Arts et activismes afroqueer: Littératures, images, performances. Edited with Dorothée Boulanger. Karthala, 2024.
- “Photographie et écriture autobiographique au Congo”. In Traumatisme et mémoire culturelle: France et espaces francophones, edited by Silke Segler-Meßner and Isabella von Treskow. De Gruyter, 2023.
- Autobiographik in Afrika: Literaturgeschichte und Genrevielfalt. WVT, 2021.
- “Congolese Child Soldier Narratives for Local and Global Audiences: From Testimony to Reconciliation”. Journal of World Literature 21 (2021): 148–166.
- The Ubiquitous Figure of the Child Soldier: Interviews with African Writers, Academics and Cultural Activists Followed by a Comprehensive Bibliography. Edited with Charlott Schönwetter. WVT, 2019.
- Kongo-Greuel: Zur literarischen Konfiguration eines kolonialkritischen Diskurses (1890–1910). Georg Olms, 2003.
