معرفی
Kata Gellen is an Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University, affiliated with Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2010). Her research focuses on German literary modernism, German-Jewish studies, postwar Austrian literature and cinema, film studies, sound studies, and trauma theory. She authored Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism (2019) and has published extensively on figures like Kafka, Musil, Rilke, and Canetti.
Her teaching spans interdisciplinary courses such as Mapping Jewish Modernism and Germany Confronts Nazism and the Holocaust, reflecting her expertise in cultural memory and modernist aesthetics. She has been featured in news articles like An Exhibit Charts the Landscape of Jewish Modernism (2024) and German Studies Department Offers Vibrant Learning Experience (2023). Her academic leadership includes directing the Center for Jewish Studies since 2025, alongside her role in German Studies since 2020.
Gellen’s work interrogates intersections of sound, space, and trauma in modernist texts and films. Recent publications analyze Kafka’s exploration of motion, Kolmar’s portrayal of maternal trauma, and Rilke’s ethical imagination. She collaborates with institutions like Cambridge University Press and Brandeis University, maintaining active external scholarly relationships.
