Kata Gellen

Kata Gellen is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. Her main areas of research and teaching include German literary modernism, German-Jewish studies, postwar Austrian literature and cinema, film studies, and sound studies. She is the author of Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) and numerous essays on writers including Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrud Kolmar, Günther Anders, and Thomas Bernhard, as well as essays on Weimar Cinema. Her book, Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, will be published with the University of Toronto Press in 2026. She is currently writing a book on contemporary transgressive Austrian cinema called Ulrich Seidl, Brutal Humanist.

 
Select Recent Publications

Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2026 (forthcoming).

 “Kafka in Motion.” The Germanic Review. Special Issue on Kafka’s Drawings. Ed. Carsten Strathausen 99.2 (2024): 229–43.

 “Martha’s Melancholia: Racial and Sexual Trauma in Gertrud Kolmar’s Die jüdische Mutter (1931).” The Germanic Review 97.1 (2022): 50-68.

“The Ethics of Imagination in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.” German Studies Review 43.3 (2020): 455–74.

“Writing Failure: Geoff Dyer, Thomas Bernhard, and the Inability to Begin.” Thomas Bernhard’s Afterlives. Ed. Olaf Berwald, Stephen Dowden, and Gregor Thuswaldner. London: Bloomsbury (New Directions in German Studies Series), 2020. 45–70.

Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019

Specializations

• Music and Sound
• Jewish Studies
• Film, Media and Visual Studies
• Austrian Studies
• Twentieth Century
• Modernism

Curriculum Vitae