DAAD Lecturers & Language Teaching Assistants

Dr Richard Feddersen is an assistant professor (DAAD lecturer) at the German Department of the Faculty of Education and at the Centre of Excellence for the Study and Research in German and Arabic as a Foreign Language (EZ-DAAF) at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. He received his PhD in German Applied Linguistics from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2023. Among other teaching positions, he was a lecturer of German at the GJU and a language teacher at the Goethe-Institut in Jordan, taught English and German at the University of Alberta in Canada, and was a project team member at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg in Germany. He has worked with diverse students of different ages, abilities, and cultural and educational backgrounds. His research, inspired and informed by his teaching experience, lies at the intersection of Second Language Research and Sociolinguistics, with a focus on identity and language ideologies and a particular interest in study abroad. His methodological approaches include tools from Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics.

Raddwa Mona is a DAAD Teaching Assistant at the German Department of the Faculty of Education at Ain Shams University in Cairo. In addition, she teaches German as a foreign language at the Goethe-Institut Cairo. She earned her Master of Arts in Theory of Language and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart with distinction, focusing on intercultural communication between German and Arabic, which is relevant for teaching German as a foreign language. She also holds the certificate “Deutsch als Fremdsprache lehren lernen” (SZP DaFLL). Before joining the DAAD, she taught Arabic as well as German as foreign and second languages and completed an internship in German as a Second Language (DaZ) at the University of Stuttgart, where she independently designed lessons, developed materials, and assessed student progress. She has also contributed to language and cultural exchange projects, including a German-language tandem project with the University of São Paulo and planning teaching sequences for German as a Second Language (DaZ) instructors at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Consultation Hours:

Sundays (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) and Mondays (9:00 AM – 11:00 AM), during Ramadan: Sundays (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM) and Mondays (8:00 AM – 10:00 AM)

Michèle Brand is a DAAD lecturer at Alexandria University in Egypt. Previously, she worked as academic staff member at the Chair of Cultural and Media Policy Studies at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen and was the academic coordinator of the DAAD-funded project “تواصل [Tawasol] Cultural Production and Policy Network”. In December 2024, she completed her PhD at the University of Hildesheim with a dissertation on cultural funding and foreign cultural policy in the context of crisis prevention, using the example of ‘Donko ni Maaya’ in Mali. From 2017 to 2022, she worked as a research associate at the Institute for Cultural Policy at the University of Hildesheim. There, she was responsible for a research cooperation with GIZ in Mali as well as for the program coordination of the ARTS RIGHTS JUSTICE project, which promotes artistic freedom of expression. As part of her work, she organized research and training formats with partners in Lebanon, Tunisia, Mali, Egypt, Ghana, Uganda, and Germany. She studied Cultural Studies and French Philology (B.A.) at the University of Potsdam, followed by a French-German Master’s degree in Cultural Mediation / Médiation Culturelle at the University of Hildesheim and Aix-Marseille University. Alongside her academic work, Michèle Brand worked as a freelance evaluator and project coordinator, including for Grimmwelt Kassel and coculture e.V. in Berlin. As a CrossCulture Fellow of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, she worked in Beirut (Lebanon) in 2017. She has also completed professional training as a conflict mediator.

After graduating from high school in 2016, Elena Wiese studied Landscape Ecology at the University of Münster (BSc, 2016–2020), spending one academic year at the University of Cádiz in Spain. She then studied Global Change Ecology with a specialisation in migration research at the University of Bayreuth (MSc, 2020–2023), spending one semester at the Université Côte d’Azur in France. At the same time, she completed additional studies in Didactics of German as a Second Language at the University of Bayreuth (2022–2023). She subsequently worked as a lecturer at the Language Centre of the University of Bayreuth and as a teacher for refugee support in German as a Second Language at the Albert Schweitzer Middle School in Bayreuth (2023–2024). Following a successful traineeship in project management and science communication at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium (2024–2025), she has been a DAAD Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Alexandria University since September 2025.

Consultation Hours:

Mondays (11:00 AM – 12:00 PM), and by appointment.

Before becoming a DAAD lecturer at KSIU (King Salman International University) in Sharm el Sheikh, Silvana Gentili worked as a teacher at a vocational college in North Rhine-Westphalia. Her responsibilities there included international exchange, the internationalization of the school, supervising international and local students and teacher training. She was also chair of the English department. Before studying at the University of Münster (1st and 2nd state examinations, Magistra Artium), she completed training courses as a foreign language correspondent for English and Spanish (IHK Dortmund), as a European secretary (Schulungszentrum Münster), and as a commercial translator for English (IHK Düsseldorf). She has been teaching German as a foreign language since 1999 – initially from 1999 to 2000 as a DAAD-sponsored intern at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, then from 2000 to 2020 as a lecturer at language schools in Münster and Lindau. During a sabbatical year, Ms. Gentili taught at the Goethe Center in Windhoek, Namibia. After completing her studies, she worked as a language assistant at the University of Putra Malaysia in Selangor, Malaysia. Ms. Gentili has conducted training courses for foreign language teachers for many years, both in Germany and abroad. She has been a DAAD lecturer at KSIU since February 2025.