Team

Sule Emmanuel Egya holds the research professorship ‘Public Social Sciences and Humanities: Key Societal Debates’ at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities and the University of Duisburg-Essen as of April 2026. Prior to his appointment, he was Professor of African Literature and Environmental Humanities at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Nigeria (2014–2026). During that time, he spent several research visits in Germany, including at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, LMU Munich and the College for Social Sciences and Humanities. Sule Egya’s main research interests have been about the response of literature and other cultural artforms to social, political, and environmental conflicts. He has published numerous articles, monographs, and edited volumes, including Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Nigerian Poetry in English (2019), Power and Resistance: Literature, Regime, and the National Imaginary (2019), and Nature, Environment and Activism in Nigerian Literature (2020). He is also an award-winning poet and novelist. He is the author of, among others, Sterile Sky (2012; Commonwealth Book Prize), Makwala (2020; ANA Prose Prize), and What the Sea Told Me (2009; winner, ANA Poetry Prize).

Tanja Literski provides administrative support to Sule Emmanuel Egya’s team in the research professorship ‘Public Social Sciences and Humanities: Key Societal Debates’. Before joining the College, she worked for the University of Duisburg-Essen and for an audit and tax consulting firm. She is a certified translator and completed her degree as Bachelor Professional of Translation (CCI) alongside work.

Lisa Seuberth is a postdoctoral researcher at the research professorship ‘Public Social Sciences and Humanities: Key Societal Debates’ (since October 2026), focusing on US-American literature and literary sociology.

She studied English and French as part of her teacher training programme at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where she afterwards completed her PhD at the DFG-funded research training group ‘Literature and the Public Sphere’. Her dissertation examines the potential of anglophone prize-winning literature to foster racial literacy in the public sphere, while also analysing the anti-black and white supremacist practices that persist in the selection processes of major literary prizes. Her postdoctoral project shifts the focus from the distribution and reception of literature to the process of literary production, examining the editing of early American women’s writing through an intersectional lens that considers race, gender, and class.