Kata Gellen, Associate Professor of German Studies

Kata Gellen

Please note: Kata has left the "Jewish Studies Program Certificate" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

My main areas of research are German modernism, German-Jewish literature, Weimar cinema, and Austrian literature. My book, Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, appeared with Northwestern University Press in 2019. In this study, I employ film theory to account for noise in Kafka’s writings—the inscrutable voices and senseless sounds produced by humans, animals, the natural world, and new technology. Rather than read these noises as an attempt to capture the cacophony of modernity, I see them as fundamentally out of place in the literary medium that contains them. However they gain legibility when we analyze them with the tools and vocabulary developed to discuss the phenomenon of sound in cinema. This approach reveals how noise persistently pushes against the borders of the literary medium, which makes it a useful means for exploring the limits and possibilities of literary expression. The struggle with noise thus enables Kafka to broach major questions of modernist literary aesthetics, including temporality, voice, and the transcendence of fictional worlds.

My current book project is called Once and Future Galicia: Jewish Literary Modernism in Eastern Europe. In this study, I argue that Galicia, the easternmost region of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, plays a central yet underexamined role in the literary works of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and Soma Morgenstern (1890-1976). A place with great personal meaning and mythic potential for these writers, Galicia allowed them to explore a range of urgent questions about Jewishness, modernity, and tradition—in particular, the role of the East in imagining Jewish futures. The study thus aims to expand our understanding of German-Jewish modernism and to situate these writers in a broader literary history of German, Hebrew and Yiddish writing on Eastern Europe in the 20th century.

In addition to these book projects, I have published articles on writers including Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Günther Anders. I have also written on Weimar Cinema, in particular the films M, Der blaue Engel, and Nosferatu. I have an enduring passion for contemporary Austrian cinema, and hope one day to write about the films of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl.

I enjoy teaching courses in English and German at all levels, from first-year seminars to lecture courses and graduate-level seminars. Recent courses I have taught include "The Image of America in German Culture" (upper-level undergraduate course in German), "Surveillance & Society" (first-year seminar in English), and "East/West/Zion: Jewish Literary Modernism" (graduate seminar). I am currently teaching "Germany Confronts Nazism and the Holocaust" and "Mapping Jewish Modernism," with Saskia Ziolkowski.

Contact Info:
Office Location:  116B Old Chemistry Building, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:  (919) 660-3168
Email Address: send me a message
Web Pages:  https://duke.academia.edu/KataGellen/
https://duke.box.com/s/5eki9htjo560823dgoyjt7ovfsulxb7f

Teaching (Spring 2024):

  • GERMAN 387.01, GERMANY CONFRONTS HOLOCAUST Synopsis
    Gray 228, MW 01:25 PM-02:40 PM
    (also cross-listed as HISTORY 261.01, JEWISHST 369.01, LIT 369.01, RIGHTS 387.01)
  • GERMAN 493.01, RESEARCH INDEPENDENT STUDY Synopsis
    Old Chem 116M, W 11:45 AM-12:45 PM
  • GERMAN 791.01, INDEPENDENT STUDY Synopsis
    SEE INSTRU, F 01:25 PM-02:40 PM
  • GERMAN 995S.01, GRAD COLLOQUIUM Synopsis
    Languages 114B, W 05:00 PM-06:30 PM
Teaching (Fall 2024):

  • GERMAN 264.01, GERMAN FILM Synopsis
    Old Chem 201, F 10:20 AM-12:50 PM
    (also cross-listed as CINE 252.01, VMS 280.01)
  • GERMAN 745S.01, BRUTAL HUMANISM Synopsis
    Old Chem 119, W 04:40 PM-07:10 PM
    (also cross-listed as LIT 745S.01, VMS 745S.01)
Office Hours:

Fall 2023: Tu/Th 11am-12pm
Education:

Ph.D.Princeton University2010
BAHarvard University2000
Curriculum Vitae
Current Ph.D. Students  

  • Claire Scott  
Recent Publications   (More Publications)

  1. Gellen, K, Stimmung, sound, and space in Robert Musil's "die versuchung der stillen Veronika", Seminar a Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 54 no. 3 (September, 2018), pp. 328-349  [abs]
  2. Gellen, K, “One Should Have Two Homelands”: Discord and Hope in Soma Morgenstern’s Sparks in the Abyss, Religions, vol. 8 no. 2 (February, 2017), pp. 26-26 [doi]  [abs]
  3. Gellen, K, Kafka, Pro and Contra: Günther Anders' Holocaust Book, in Kafka and the Universal, edited by Cools, A; Liska, V (2016), pp. 283-306, de Gruyter
  4. Gellen, K, Noises Off: Cinematic Sound in Kafka's "The Burrow", in Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image (2016), pp. 111-129, Wallflower Press
  5. Gellen, K, Indexing identity: Fritz Lang's M, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 22 no. 3 (January, 2015), pp. 425-448, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISSN 1080-6601