Dr. phil. James Orao

Dr. James Orao is a Senior Lecturer in Intercultural German Studies at the University of Nairobi (Kenya). He studied Bachelor of Education (Education, Literature and German as a Foreign Language) at Kenyatta University (Nairobi), MA in Intercultural German Studies at the University of Nairobi and completed his PhD in 2014 at the Graduate School Practices of Literature at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster on the topic “Erzählte Interkulturalität – Migrationen und Identitätsspiele in der zeitgenössischen deutsch- und englischsprachigen Migrationsliteratur”. 

The interdisciplinary orientation of the Linguistics department at the university of Nairobi has led him to work, supervise and research across disciplines with various topics from different fields. This has opened up new areas of interest in his research, as his most recent publications show.

Teaching and research interests: German-language contemporary literature, intercultural literature in German and English and contemporary African literature with a focus on African SFF. 

Selected publications include: 

• “What Kind Of A Woman Are You?” Narrating hybridity in Nnedi Okorafor’s works. [kon] Paper No. 11: HYBRID. pp. 34-36 (2025)
• “For a Post-Historical Poetics in the Contemporary African Urban Novel.” Humanities Bulletin Journal. Vol 5, No. 1, pp. 159-172, (2022); 
• “Moving the Center: Positions & Locations of African Speculative Fiction.” ALT 39: Speculative & Science Fiction, pp. 111-124, (2021); 
• “Störenfried Burton, oder die Grenzen der kolonialen Ordnung.” German as a Foreign Language (3/2019), pp. 62-74, (2019); 
• Selbstverortungen - Migration und Identität in der zeitgenössischen deutsch- und englischsprachigen Migrationsliteratur. (2014);

• “Metaphern der Migration: die Figurationen des Reisens in der zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Migrationsliteratur.” In, Schwerpunkt der DaF-Studiengänge und Germanistik im östlichen Afrika. Volume 91: “Materialien Deutsch als Fremdsprache”, pp. 17-32, (2014).

  Dr. Orao is currently the President of the Association of German Studies in East and Central Africa (GOZA).