Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations, like those depicted in his writing.
Siegbert Salomon Prawer was Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.
Oliver Taplin, FBA is a retired British academic and classicist. He was a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil from Oxford University.
Joseph Peter Maria Stern, FBA was an authority on German literature.
Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.
Bernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies.
Roger Harrison Lonsdale, FBA was a British literary scholar and academic born in Hornsea, East Riding of Yorkshire. He was a Fellow and Tutor at Balliol College Oxford from 1963 to 2000, and Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991. Lonsdale died in Oxford on 28 February 2022, at the age of 87. He was married to the archaeologist Nicoletta Momigliano.
"Jackals and Arabs" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. The story was first published by Martin Buber in the German monthly Der Jude. It appeared again in the collection Ein Landarzt in 1919.
Edward Timms OBE, FBA was Research Professor and a former director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at University of Sussex. His work mainly focused on Karl Kraus and Freud. Timms was also a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge His two-volume work Karl Kraus – Apocalyptic Satirist is concerned with Kraus's satirical responses to Hapsburg Vienna, his rejection of both the First World War and Nazism. Kraus had been the subject of his PhD.
Derek Attridge FBA is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature and a current Professor of English at the University of York, a post he has held since 2003. Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce, deconstruction and literary theory and the performance of poetry. He wrote a monograph on South African writer J. M. Coetzee.
Simon Gaunt (1959-2021) was a professor of French literature at King's College London, where he was Head of the French Department and Head of the School of Humanities. He was past president of the Society for French Studies (2006-8), a Fellow of King's College, London from 2015 and an Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge from 2016.
Anthony Arthur Long FBA is a British-American classical scholar who is the Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature Emeritus, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nicholas Boyle FBA is an English literary critic. He is the emeritus Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has written widely on German literature, intellectual history and religion and is known particularly for his award-winning extensive biography of Goethe. Boyle became a fellow of the British Academy in 2000.
The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages is a department of the University of Oxford, England. It is part of the university's Humanities Division.
Mark. H. Gelber is an American-Israeli scholar of comparative literature and German-Jewish literature and culture. He received his B.A. magna cum laude and with high honors in Letters and German. He also studied at the University of Bonn, the University of Grenoble, and Tel Aviv University. He was accepted for graduate studies as a Lewis Farmington Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Yale University and he received his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. In 1980 he accepted an appointment as post-doctoral lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Except for guest professorships and research fellowships abroad, he has been affiliated there since that time. His research topics include: German-Jewish literature and culture, the literature of exile, cultural Zionism, early Zionist literature and journalism, literary anti-Semitism, autobiography and biography, and literary reception. He lectures frequently at international meetings and conferences in Israel, Europe, China, and the United States. He is presently professor emeritus with active researcher status.
Victor Henri Brombert is an American scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century literature, the Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University.
Anne Fuchs, is an academic specialist on modern and post-war German literature and Culture.
Carolin Duttlinger is a German academic and Germanist. She studied at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctorate in 2003. She is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor of Wadham College. In 2016 and 2019-20 she was external senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
