About the Project

With funding from the DAAD, four visiting professors from partner universities in Africa will teach at the University of Tübingen, from October 2024 to September 2026. The four visiting professors are experts in their fields, and each of them teaches three courses over one semester in Tübingen. The courses taught by the visiting professors support the establishment of African Studies at the University of Tübingen via the recently launched BA (minor) study programme African Literary and Cultural Studies.

The visiting chair is named after Mzee Suleimann Ali Nyembwe, a renowned orator and a custodian of the historical and cultural knowledge of the Digo community on the Kenyan coast. Though without a university degree himself, Mzee Nyembwe is famous in university lecture rooms in Kenya. For decades, he has been very instrumental in teaching and research in oral literature – he has tirelessly dedicated countless hours to interviews with local and international researchers who are interested in the cultural and historical knowledge that he possesses, the type of knowledge that has proven to be very critical in challenging but also complementing available knowledge. 

Visiting Professors

WiSe 2024/25: Dr. Kimingichi Wabende (University of Nairobi, Kenya) 

Dr. Kimingichi Wabende teaches Oral Literature and Performance at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He has vast experience in the research and practice of Theatre for Development, ritual performance as contexts of oral literature and applied oral literature, and online liveness. 

SoSe 2025: Prof. Charne Lavery (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Prof. Charne Lavery teaches courses in Literary Theory, Popular Culture, Comparative African Literature, and Indian Ocean Literature in the Department of English at University of Pretoria in South Africa. She is also affiliated with the University of the Witwatersrand, where Dr. Lavery is co-director of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South (OHGS) project hosted at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER).

WiSe 2025/26: Dr. Gibson Ncube (Stellenbosch University, South Africa) 

Dr. Gibson Ncube teaches French language and Francophone literatures and cultures at Stellenbosch University. He currently holds a C1 National Research Foundation (NRF) rating, and he has published extensively on Postcolonial African literatures and cultures especially from Anglophone and Francophone countries. His research interests are in Comparative Literatures, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial African Cultural Studies.

SoSe 26: Dr. Edgar Nabutanyi (Makerere University, Uganda)

Dr. Edgar Nabutanyi teaches Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Makarere in Uganda, one of CIVIS partner universities in Africa. He is also the coordinator of the CHUSS Graduate School in Makerere University, an Inter-disciplinary PhD by Research programme funded by the The Gerda Henkel Foundation, which is one of the most prominent doctoral training programmes in the fields of Historical Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences in Africa. He has published widely in the fields of Gender Studies, Queer Studies, African Literature and African Cultural Studies.