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Kafka's Transformative Communities is an Arts and Humanities Research Council Project hosted by the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, an international hub of Kafka research and home of theGlobal Kafka Network.

Capturing the global dimensions of Kafka studies in the twenty-first century, the project promotes Kafka adaptations through many creative partnerships and foregrounds a central but neglected aspect of his work: community.

Since his untimely death in 1924, Franz Kafka (b. 1883) has become a global phenomenon. Every generation has discovered ‘its’ Kafka. Across seismic shifts his texts have spoken to readers from all walks of life, as reflected during the Covid pandemic, when memes about Gregor Samsa trapped in his bedroom went viral. Both Kafka and his protagonists are often cast as isolated individuals disconnected from their surroundings. The AHRC-funded Project Kafka’s Transformative Communities challenges by foregrounding community in his work.

Community emerges as a theme time and again in Kafka’s writings, from his earliest texts to his last story and artistic testament, ‘Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse-People’, whose artist-protagonist is defined by her relationship with her audience. Our project uses Kafka’s diverse engagement with ideas of community as the springboard for dynamic engagement with his texts, contexts and legacy, treating creative responses to Kafka not as afterthoughts but as forms of investigation and interpretation in their own right.