More about the Project

The AHRC-funded Kafka's Transformative Communities project is structured around three themes. First, the Community theme (led by PI Carolin Duttlinger) explores how Kafka’s literary depiction of groups and collectives is shaped by, and in turn responds to, the central role of community in his immediate Jewish and wider Austro-Hungarian context. Widening the project’s spatial and temporal focus, the second theme, Worldliness (led by Co-I Barry Murnane), focusses on Kafka’s role as a world author, looking at his reception in different times and places, while relating this status back to his own writings – his engagement with the power dynamics of a globalising world, in an age of colonialism, war and empire. Third, the Transformation theme (led by Co-Is Katrin Kohl and Lucia Ruprecht) assesses Kafka’s posthumous legacy in different art forms and media and their respective audiences. Our project does not treat such creative responses as an afterthought but as forms of investigation and interpretation in their own right.