Aleida Assman is a Professor Emerita for English Literature  and  Cultural  Studies,  University  of Konstanz, Germany; Johannes Gutenberg Professor 2015, University of Mainz. Her fields of research interests cover: individual and collective remembering, cultural memory, coping with trauma and violence in history and memory, forms of forgetting, media of memory, structure and function of the archive. Publications in English: Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge University Press, 2011; Empathy and its Limits. Basingstoke: Palgrave  MacMillan, 2015. (with Ines Detmers); Shadows of   Trauma. Memory and Politics of Postwar Identity. New York: Fordham 2016.