Born Aleida Bornkamm in , North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, she is the daughter of the New Testament scholar
Günther Bornkamm and his wife, Elisabeth. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen from 1966 to 1972. In 1977 she wrote her dissertation in Heidelberg about
The Legitimacy of Fiction (
Die Legitimation der Fiktion). She had to take her minor field examination in Egyptology in Tübingen because her husband
Jan Assmann had become a professor of Egyptology in Heidelberg. In 1992 Assmann completed her habilitation in Heidelberg. In 1993 she became a professor of English and Literary Studies at the
University of Konstanz, where she remained to 2014. She was a visiting professor at Rice University in Houston (2000), at
Princeton University in 2001, at
Yale University in 2002, 2003 and 2005, and at the
University of Vienna in 2005. She was visiting professor at the
University of Chicago in 2007. Assmann's early works were about English Literature and the history of literary communication. Since the 1990s her focus has been on cultural anthropology, especially Cultural and Communicative Memory, terms she and her husband coined and developed. Her specific interests is focused on the history of German memory since 1945, the role of generations in literature and society, and theories of memory. Since 2011 she has been working on a research project titled
The Past in the Present: Dimensions and Dynamics of Cultural Memory. This project summarizes in English her and
Jan Assmann's work on cultural memory. == Awards ==