Digital Kafka Symposium

The Department of German presents the Digital Kafka Symposium, held November 1-2, 2024. This two-day symposium brings together researchers from the institutions that hold Kafka’s oeuvre with scholars, teachers, creators, and digital scholarship specialists to discuss and exchange details about current digital approaches to Franz Kafka’s works.

Franz Kafka’s oeuvre has been examined countless times in the past—mostly in the form of articles and contributions to books and edited volumes. As his works have been available in the digital realm for quite some time now, including many of his drawings, this symposium aims to focus on research, teaching, and creative approaches that either make use of digital tools to analyze Kafka’s work or use digital platforms to share and disseminate parts of Kafka’s oeuvre and its analyses. The 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death in 2024 seems to be an apt moment to look at digital approaches to his texts and drawings that build on the affordances of Digital Humanities, which has become an established area of scholarly activity in the past decades.

At the symposium, researchers will share their digital projects and approaches, and we will discuss the following questions, among others:

· What can digital approaches reveal about Kafka’s writings and drawings? How do these analyses change or extend existing scholarship?

· How can digital tools be useful for creative approaches to Kafka’s works? How can the materiality of Kafka’s oeuvre be preserved in the digital realm?

· How can digital approaches enhance teaching Kafka’s texts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching his writings using digital platforms?

· What role do the archives and institutions that hold Kafka’s work play in offering and disseminating his works digitally?

Separate registration for each day is required. Please view the full schedule of presenters and panels here.

To register for Friday, November 1, please do so through Eventbrite here.

To register for Saturday, November 2, please do so through Eventbrite here.

If you would like to register for an online-only version of the event, please do so through this link to receive Zoom room information.