You are invited to a series of lectures and panel discussions on Kafka’s ideas in the present-day context. Four days “full of Kafka”.
In the year of the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death, the Transatlantic Kafka project will present innovative, inspiring, and topical discussions focusing on this important writer in the context of contemporary society. In June 2024, the project will bring together prominent writers, academics, and artists from the US and Europe to create a space for the intersection of American and European perspectives on Kafka’s work. Through this meeting, we aim to stimulate enriching cultural dialogue and the exchange of ideas, helping to keep Franz Kafka’s legacy alive for current and future generations.
Merve Emre, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, will give the keynote lecture. Emre is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, among other prestigious institutions.
The Museum is working closely with major partners, including Anglo-American University of Prague, the Vaclav Havel Library, the American University of Paris, and Harvard University. The event is supported by the Embassy of the United States in Prague, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague, and the City of Prague.
All lectures and panel discussions will be simultaneously interpreted into Czech/English.
PARTICIPANTS CONFIRMED:
Merve Emre
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, the CBC, and The Spectator. She currently serves on the boards of Words Without Borders, the Hawthornden Foundation, and Connecticut Humanities. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
Ross Benjamin
Ross Benjamin is the internationally renowned translator of Franz Kafka’s Diaries. His other translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, among other awards.
Daniel Medin
Daniel Medin is Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. His research is concerned with modern fiction from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with an emphasis on the work and global reception of Franz Kafka. He is a director of the Center for Writers and Translators and one of the editors of its Cahiers Series.
Manfred Müller
Manfred Müller is the director of the Austrian Society for Literature, president of the Austrian Franz Kafka Society, and a lecturer at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Vienna. He focuses mainly on 20th and 21st century literature. His new book Kafka träumt (Kafka’s Dreams) will be published in April 2024 by the Austrian publishing house Jung und Jung.
Hans Platzgumer
Hans Platzgumer is awriter, musician, composer, and author. The central themes in his literary work are the ethics of human behavior, decision-making, and the perception of responsibility. His book Die ungeheure Welt in meinem Kopf (The Terrible World in My Head), a tribute to Franz Kafka (Elster & Salis), will be published in April 2024.
Magdaléna Platzová
Magdaléna Platzová is a Czech writer living in France. She is the author of several novels, including her latest work, Life After Kafka (2022), about Kafka’s fiancée Felice Bauer and other people who were close to Kafka and whose fates were connected to pre-war Europe and its ruins. From 2009 to 2012, Platzová lived in New York City, where she taught courses on Franz Kafka at New York University.
Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the Women’s Prize. The sequel, Either/Or, was published in 2022. She is a 2024 fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has been a staff writer at New Yorker since 2010.
Seth Rogoff
Seth Rogoff is the co-organizer of the Transatlantic Kafka project. He is the author of the forthcoming novel The Castle, an intertextual exploration of Franz Kafka’s great unfinished work, which will be published in the United States by FC2 in October 2024. His previous novels include, First, the Raven: A Preface (2017), Thin Rising Vapors (2018), and The Kirschbaum Lectures (2023). He is a university lecturer at the Anglo-American University in Prague and a scholar of media studies, literature, and cultural analysis. He has translated many works by Franz Kafka, including the novel The Castle (Vitalis 2007).
Mahulena Svobodová
Mahulena Svobodová is an architect, who works in the Office of Neighborhood Development at the Institute of Planning and Development of the City of Prague, where she is responsible for the planning study of the Prague Conservation Area.
Veronika Tuckerová
Veronika Tuckerová is a literary scholar and translator. She teaches at Harvard University’s Slavic Department. Her interests include Czech and German literature, the art and literature of dissent, and translation theory and practice. She collaborated on the exhibition From Franz Kafka to the Velvet Revolution. Her book on the Czechoslovak reception of Kafka from the 1920s to 1989 is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Monika Zgustová
Monika Zgustová is awriter, translator, and winner of several major awards, Her literary works have been published in ten languages. She lives in Barcelona and writes for El Pais, The Nation, CounterPunch, and other periodicals. As a translator of Czech and Russian literature, she has been instrumental in introducing important 20th century writers into Spanish and Catalan. Her new novel Soy Milena de Praga (I am Milena from Prague), which traces the life of journalist and translator Milena Jesenska, was recently published by Galaxia Gutenberg in Spain.
