Syamala Roberts

Syamala Roberts is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and was formerly Fellow in German of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is currently working on a book based on her doctoral research on hearing and listening in German modernist literature. It draws on a wide range of material from modernist figures including Kafka, Rilke, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser, as well as critical theory on the philosophy of listening. Syamala is also interested in German modernism on the international stage and is developing a new project on Indo-German cultural exchange in this period. Her recent work on Kafka has explored (mis)hearing and the law in The Trial; stage and screen performances of ‘A Report to an Academy’; the ‘elastic’ forms of Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenská; and writer’s block and wasting time.