Metamorphoses

In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka?

Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford’s All Souls College, will tell Kafka’s story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka’s birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself.

Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka’s life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka’s life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.

Karolina Watroba

Karolina Watroba is a research fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she works on modern literature and film across eight European languages and beyond, with a focus on German, English, and Polish. Karolina lives in Oxford, England.

Tess Little

Tess Little is a writer and historian, with research interests in twentieth-century Europe and the US. Her doctoral thesis examined the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s in transnational perspective through a case study of the links between the movements in the US, UK, and France. She surveyed archival material and conducted life history interviews with activists in all three countries to trace theory, protest tactics, and organisational ideas which spread across national borders.