Karolina Watroba

I research and teach modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today. I work across several languages, including German, Polish, Spanish, and Korean. I am a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages, University of Oxford. In 2019-2024, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

My first book, Mann's Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (OUP, 2022), is the first study of Thomas Mann's landmark German modernist novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) that takes as its starting point the interest in Mann’s book shown by non-academic readers, moving from interwar Germany and Soviet Russia to present-day Hollywood and Japan, and beyond. It is also a case study in a cluster of issues central to the interrelated fields of transnational German studies, global modernism studies, comparative literature, and reception theory: it discusses the global circulation of German modernism, popular afterlives of a canonical work, access to cultural participation, relationship between so-called 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' culture, and the limitations of traditional academic reading practices. The book aims to present at once a sharply focussed and widely applicable argument about how and why literary scholars can and should study non-academic reading practices.

My second book, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (Profile, 2024), aims to introduce this reader-oriented approach to a wider audience. It 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. In 2023, I received a British Academy Talent Development Award to continue the underlying research on the creative reception of Kafka in contemporary Korean culture, and presented this work at Durham University as the winner of the Ann Moss Early Career Keynote Lecture Competition.

Visit my Faculty profile here.