Karolina Watroba

Fellow, SCAS

Honorary Research Fellow, University of Oxford

Photo of Karolina Watroba

Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt

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 University 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.

Learn more about Karolina Watroba's research project.