Karolina Watroba

Fellow, SCAS.
Honorary Research Fellow, University of Oxford

Karolina Watroba researches and teaches modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European
modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today. She works across several languages,
including German, Polish, Spanish, and Korean. In 2019-2024, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She holds a BA, MSt, and DPhil in German and Comparative
Literature from the University of Oxford. 

Watroba is the author of Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2022) and Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (Profile Books, 2024). Her research
has won many prizes and awards, including from the British Academy and the American Comparative
Literature Association.

At SCAS, Watroba will be working on her third book, provisionally titled World Literature in Weimar
Germany: Texts, Authors, Institutions, which 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.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.