Karolina Watroba (Incoming Fellow 2024-25)

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages, All Souls College, University of Oxford 

Karolina Watroba will be working on her third book, provisionally titled World Literature in Weimar
Germany: Texts, Authors, Institutions. This book seeks to reframe the German literary scene between
the wars by illuminating its hidden cultural diversity. It analyses forgotten transnational books, writers,
and literary institutions that were widely known and often critically acclaimed in the 1920s and 1930s
but have since been excluded from national canons. Examples of authors included in this project are
the Azeri-German Jewish-Muslim novelist and cultural critic Lev Nussimbaum (also known as Essad
Bey and Kurban Said), the Polish-German poet and dramatist Eleonora Kalkowska, and the Korean-
German essayist and journalist Mirok Li. These authors navigated their complex social identities in
their writing in creative and imaginative ways. Watroba's research further investigates their direct
and indirect ties to prominent but understudied Weimar-era literary institutions, including the journal
Die literarische Welt (The Literary World) and the book series Romane der Welt (Novels of the
World). The aim is to understand the possibilities – and limitations – of imagining a transnational
literary‘world’ from the vantage point of major cultural centres in Weimar Germany, such as Berlin
and Munich.