The Oxford Kafka Research Centre aims to advance and co-ordinate research on Franz Kafka, and more generally on German-language and especially German-Jewish literature and culture in the period of Modernism. The Centre aims to serve the whole spectrum of Kafka studies, ranging from biographical and historical research via literary and cultural studies to methodological and theoretical inquiries. It particularly aims to encourage interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches.
Directors
Carolin Duttlinger
Professor of German Literature and Culture, Wadham College, Oxford
Principal Investigator, AHRC Kafka's Transformative Communities
Carolin Duttlinger has worked on Kafka on and off for over two decades. Her initial route into his work was via his ambivalent fascination with photography. She has since explored other aspects, such as Kafka's interest in the interplay between attention and distraction, and his deep concern with the notion of community. Her books include Kafka and Photography (OUP 2007); The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (CUP 2013); Kafkas 'Betrachtung': Neue Lektüren (Rombach 2014); Franz Kafka in Context (CUP 2017); and Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought and Culture (OUP 2022).
Ritchie Robertson
Emeritus Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature, Queen's College, Oxford
Ritchie Robertson is the author of Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) and Kafka: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and numerous articles on Kafka and his contemporaries. He translated The Man who Disappeared for the Oxford World’s Classics series (2012).
Katrin Kohl
Professor of German Literature, Jesus College, Oxford
Co-Investigator, AHRC Kafka's Transformative Communities
Katrin Kohl is Professor of German Literature at Oxford. She has published widely on German literature and poetics, and is the author of Poetologische Metaphern (de Gruyter, 2007), on conceptualizations of fictional writing. She is currently working on the role of metaphor in Kafka’s writings.
Barry Murnane
Associate Professor in German, St John's College, Oxford
Co-Investigator, AHRC Kafka's Transformative Communities
Barry Murnane has published widely on topics from the early-1700s to the present day, but he has particular interests in literature and culture around 1800, modernism, and Gothic/fantastic literature. A comparative scholar by training, he has been interested in Franz Kafka and Prague modernism for a long time, including his book “Verkehr mit Gespenstern.” Gothic und Moderne bei Franz Kafka (2008) and the collection Popular Revenants (ed. with A. Cusack, 2012). His current research aims to develop a material(ist) history of Weltliteratur/world literature, and he will be leading on the "Worldliness" strand of Kafka's Transformative Communities.
Other investigators and research associates
Lucia Ruprecht
Professor of Critical Dance Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
Co-Investigator, AHRC Kafka's Transformative Communities
Lucia Ruprecht came to Kafka via her interest in early twentieth-century cultures of gesture. In her book Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century (OUP 2019), she argues that Kafka’s new and proliferating gestures, based as they are on an unexplainable yet unerring necessity, exude what she calls ‘immanent grace’: an inner logic that suggests a forward-looking directedness towards the as yet unknown. This places them in the vicinity of the unfamiliar grace of contemporaneous dancer-choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky. For Kafka’s Transformative Communities, she is the academic lead of Arthur Pita’s choreographic adaptation of ‘A Hunger Artist’.
Ian Ellison
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford
Ian Ellison is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded "Kafka's Transformative Communities" project at the University of Oxford. His work investigates forms of cultural afterlife in European literature, with a particular focus on posterity in the work of European modernists and on the public commemoration of modernist writers. Ian was previously a DAAD PRIME fellow at the University of Kent and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, and he has held several stipendiary fellowships at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. He was short-listed for the 2023 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize and his first book Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (2022) is out now.
Meindert Peters
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, New College, Oxford
Meindert Peters is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Junior Research Fellow at New College, both at Oxford. He is founder of the Young Kafka Scholars' Network and co-curator of the Kafka: Making of an Icon exhibition. His current research explores dance adaptations of modernist literature such as Arthur Pita's adaptations of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and 'A Hunger Artist.' He is the author of 'Kafka as Literature of the Absurd', forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to AbsurdistLiterature (2024), and of Habituation in German Modernism (Camden House: forthcoming in 2024).
Karolina Watroba
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford
Dr Karolina Watroba is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She works on modern literature, film, and culture across several languages, with a focus on German, English, Polish, and more recently Korean. She is the author of Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (Oxford: OUP, 2022). Her forthcoming book Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (London: Profile, 2024) is an unconventional biography which tells Kafka’s story through the stories of his readers around the world, focusing on Oxford, Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem, and Seoul. Watroba is developing one strand of this project, on the reception of Kafka in Korea, as a recipient of a British Academy Talent Development Award.
Urs Büttner
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Queen's College, Oxford
For more information about the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, the Kafka's Transformative Communities project, and its other associated creative practitioners, see their website. You can stay updated with the project on Twitter and Instagram.