Franz Kafka at Brandeis 1924/2024: A Celebratory Panel Discussion
About the Event
Join us for the following panel discussions with 3 guest speakers:
Indeterminate Roots: Learning to Teach with Kafka (Evan Parks)
Turn, turn, turn: Kafka’s parables and the history of the mashal (Abigail Gillman)
Description of a Struggle: Kafka’s Prague Novella Revisited (Veronika Tuckerová)
About the Speakers
Evan Parks is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Humanities and Director of Education for the Bronfman Fellowship. His research treats modern German literature and culture, the entanglement of German and Jewish intellectual traditions, and the relationship between literature and philosophy. He is completing a book project that explores tensions between Paul Celan’s poetry and agendas of his philosophical readers, especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jacques Derrida. Evan has taught in the Department of Germanic Languages and the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where he was shortlisted for the 2023 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.
Abigail Gillman is Professor of Hebrew, German and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. She is also a Core Faculty member at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of two books: Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler (Penn State Press, 2009) and A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Her current research is on the mashal across Jewish literature and on Jewish translation history.
Veronika Tuckerová teaches at Harvard University's Slavic Department. She grew up in Prague and studied at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Columbia University. Her interests include Czech and German literature, art and literature of dissent, visual arts, and translation theory and practice. Her articles appeared in journals such as The New German Critique, Journal of World Literature, and brücken. Tuckerová is a long-term contributor to the Prague based journal Revolver Revue and the monthly Roš chodeš. She edited and co-translated the first bilingual English edition of the poetry of Ivan Blatný, The Drug of Art, which received several awards. She collaborated on two major exhibitions held in Prague on art and dissent, including From Franz Kafka to the Velvet Revolution. Her book, Reading Kafka in Prague: on Translation, Samizdat, Censorship, Export, and Dissent, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025.
