Selected Publications
- Ed., Kafka in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- Ed., with Silke Horstkotte, Weimar Photography in Context: Seriality, Sequentiality, Narrativity, special issue of Monatshefte, 109:2 (July 2017)
- The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Ed., with Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Freiburg/Br.: Rombach Litterae, 2012)
- Kafka and Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
FRIAS Project
Walter Benjamin’s Journalistic Networks
Following the rejection of his professorial dissertation, Walter Benjamin decided to rebrand himself as a freelance journalist and writer. Between 1926 and his death in 1940 he produced around 220 pieces of journalistic writing – essays, reviews, travelogues and short fiction – and ca. 80 radio broadcasts. To date, this corpus remains largely unexplored. This monograph will analyse Benjamin’s journalism both in its own right – as a space of narrative experimentation, theoretical reflection and critical practice – and in its interaction with his theoretical projects, to which it is connected in intricate and often unexpected ways. My study will draw on the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe, which has opened up new insight into Benjamin’s working method, and on as yet unpublished material housed in the Benjamin Archive in Berlin. The aim is to move beyond the single-text-based approach which still informs much of Benjamin scholarship in favour of readings which trace the recurrence and evolution of ideas across the different parts of his work. In addition, it will reconstruct the interpersonal and institutional networks which underpinned this work and will look at Benjamin’s journalism as an active intervention into the cultural politics of his time.