Call for Papers and Creative Responses: Kafka in New York
Deadline
October 21, 2024
at 11:59 PM
Extended Deadline: Mon, October 21, by 11:59 PM.
Eligibilty: CUNY GC students and SUNY New Paltz graduate students.
From November 2024 through April 2025, the Morgan Library will be presenting “Franz Kafka,” an exhibition drawn from the Bodleian Library’s extraordinary collection of Kafka’s papers. The exhibition will showcase the manuscripts of the novels Amerika and The Castle and the stories “The Metamorphosis,” “A Hunger Artist,” “The Judgment”, and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk;” Kafka’s diaries; letters and postcards to family members, particularly his sister Ottla; rarely-seen photographs; early editions of his work; and many other unique items, including his drawings and the notebooks he kept when learning Hebrew.
The Morgan Library, the Goethe-Institut, the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, and SUNY New Paltz are thrilled to issue a call for graduate student papers that respond either to the objects in the exhibition or to its themes. These themes include, but are not limited to:
- Kafka and New York City
- translation (its geographies, modalities, and politics)
- the émigré publishers and editors who were central to the publication of Kafka’s works, including Salman Schocken, Kurt and Helen Wolff, and Hannah Arendt
- an artifact, manuscript, image, or relationship surfaced in the exhibition
- the fates of Kafka’s manuscripts
- family, peers, and social networks and literary creation
- centering the labor of sisters in literary studies
- literary archives, estates, and legacies
- ideologically freighted animal worlds (insects, mice, vermin)
Selected applicants will receive a small $ stipend (of a few hundred dollars) and will present their papers or creative responses at the Dec 5th “Kafka in New York” Symposium on Franz Kafka, New York, and translation at the CUNY Graduate Center. Presentations will be about 10 minutes. Please submit an abstract of up to 300 words to this GOOGLE FORM. Students can choose to respond in the following ways: a conference paper, a creative response, a film/video response. We welcome a wide variety of interdisciplinary responses. Selected presenters will also be given a tour of the exhibition by the curator on the afternoon of December 5th.
Participants will not have direct access to the objects in the exhibition, given their rarity and fragility, but the curator, Sal Robinson, is happy to provide information about specific items, on request. Please email us at [email protected] if you have any questions.
Wherever applicable, contributions can be published on Distributaries, a print and online publication series of collaborative and creative work in the humanities at CUNY, housed at the Center for the Humanities.
Related Symposium
This symposium “Kafka in New York” at the CUNY Graduate Center is in celebration and conjunction with the exhibition “Franz Kafka” at the Morgan Library & Museum on view November 22, 2024 through April 13, 2025. This symposium is organized and co-sponsored by the Morgan Library & Museum, the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Goethe-Institut, and SUNY New Paltz.
