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The Cameroonian Humboldtian and former Georg Forster Fellow Albert Gouaffo has been chosen to receive this year’s Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prize. The award includes €10,000 and a one-month research stay in Germany.
A strong voice against forgetting the colonial past
Albert Gouaffo is a literary and cultural scholar at the University of Dschang in western Cameroon and researches the culture of remembrance, post-colonialism and German-African literature. He completed his doctorate in 1997 at Saarland University on the experience of being an outsider as examined in francophone African literature in the German language and cultural area. He was also a Georg Forster Fellow from 2004 to 2006 at Saarland University where he subsequently completed his Habilitation. He has been a professor at the University of Dschang since 2006. With a wide range of publications in German, French and English, he promotes intercultural German studies and the examination of the German colonial period in Cameroon. As the founder of a German studies journal and Vice President of the association "German Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa", he is also committed to networking German studies on the continent.
Albert Gouaffo’s research makes an important contribution to the recognition of colonial violence and the historically sensitive treatment of African cultural assets, the DAAD statement noted. His work on the German colonial period in West Africa also sheds light on a dark chapter of German history.
The Grimm Prizes
Since 1995, the DAAD has honoured foreign academics with the Grimm Prizes for their outstanding services to international cooperation in the field of German studies and German as a foreign language. The prizes are funded by the Federal Foreign Office. The awards will be presented by DAAD Vice President Muriel Helbig on 23 July at Graz University as part of the congress of the International Association for German Studies. This year’s Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Advancement Prize, which has been awarded to young researchers in German studies since 2011, goes to Elaine Cristina Roschel Nunes from Brazil.