Franz Kafka’s role as a world author is inextricably linked to his reception and afterlife. His global legacy has been shaped by academic as well as general readers, and by creative practitioners working across different art forms and media. The centenary of Kafka’s death in 2024 offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take stock of this living legacy while setting new research agendas for the future.
Category: News
New Kafkaesque Story Collection with Ali Smith, Elif Batuman, and more
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, a book of 10 brand new stories inspired by Kafka’s work, is written by a list of major literary bestsellers and prize winners. These include Ali Smith, Joshua Cohen, Elif Batuman, Naomi Alderman, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Leone Ross and Charlie Kaufman. The stories will be introduced by prize-winning critic Becca Rothfeld.
£1m AHRC Award to OKRC’s Kafka Project
The Arts & Humanities Research Council has awarded over one million pounds to our project entitled ‘Kafka’s Transformative Communities.’ It is a collaboration between Profs. Carolin Duttlinger (PI, Oxford), Katrin Kohl (Co-I, Oxford), Barry Murnane (Co-I, Oxford), and Lucia Ruprecht (Co-I, Free University Berlin).
Job Alert: Come Work With Us!
The Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford is seeking to appoint a fixed-term, full-time postdoctoral research associate for three years, starting on 1 January 2024, as part of our AHRC-funded project Kafka’s Transformative Communities.
CfP: Kafkaesque in the Arts
In May 2024, the Archiv der Zeitgenossen in Krems (Austria) will host the conference “The Kafkaesque in the Arts”. The conference language is German. The Call for Papers can be found here: https://www.archivderzeitgenossen.at/das-archiv/news/detail/news/detail/News/call-for-papers-das-kafkaeske-in-den-kuensten/
New Book: Attention and Distraction
The OKRC’s own Carolin Duttlinger has recently published a book called Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture with Oxford University Press. It is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study which explores the dynamic relation between attention and distraction from the Enlightenment to the present day. And it includes an entire chapter on Kafka:…
Interview
For the first issue of Tablecloth Magazine over at Goldsmiths, Oxford’s Professor Carolin Duttlinger and Dr Karolina Watroba were interviewed by Tania Arenas about Kafka’s unlikely appeal to ‘Gen Z’. Kafka is finding a new life on TikTok and Twitter with young, mostly female, fans. An excerpt from the interview: “Kafka was clearly a point…
Upcoming Event: Franz Kafka: The Drawings — A Roundtable with Andreas Kilcher and the Oxford Kafka Research Centre
The Oxford Kafka Research Centre is excited to host a roundtable to celebrate the publication of Franz Kafka: The Drawings by Yale University Press. We are joined by the book’s editor Andreas Kilcher, Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at ETH Zürich, to discuss Franz Kafka’s drawings and the new perspectives they bring to his…
‘Kafka Global’ Workshop (2)
On 6 May, the Oxford Kafka Research Centre organised another workshop, this time to discuss the exciting possibilities of a cultural programme around the Kafka Global Project. With us to discuss were artists and producers from different disciplines in the arts. In the first roundtable, playwright Ed Harris and BBC Radio producer Sasha Yevtushenko discussed…
New Article: ‘Kafka in Oxford’
Carolin Duttlinger, co-director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, just published a new article on the history of Kafka’s manuscripts. In the article, she traces how so many of the writings of this early-twentieth-century writer from Prague ended up in Oxford and reflects on the manuscripts as representing an ongoing inspiration and obligation to Kafka…