Anna Horakova
Assistant Professor
Education
Ph.D. Cornell University (German Studies) 2016
M.St. University of Oxford (Medieval & Modern Languages) 2010
BA University of Oxford (Philosophy & Modern Languages) 2009
Areas of Expertise
20th- and 21st-century German literature and culture, German-speaking literature of migration, cultures of dissidence and samizdat, theories of the avant-garde, Film and Visual Studies
Bio
Anna Horakova is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. She holds BA and Masters degrees from the University of Oxford, a PhD from Cornell University, and conducted part of her doctoral research at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She was a postdoctoral Harvard College Fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University. She has also taught at the College of William & Mary, Emory University, Lafayette College, and the University of Grenoble, France.
Horakova’s research and teaching focus on Cold War-era and contemporary German-speaking literatures and cultures, specifically on East German literature in the transnational and post-Soviet contexts. Her monograph-in-progress reappraises unofficial print culture of dissident movements in East Germany that was often published in samizdat, with particular emphasis on these movements’ diverse engagements with multiple media, transnationalism, and gender. She has published articles on literary exchanges between the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia in the works of the poet and novelist Jan Faktor (German Life & Letters 2015, republished in 2019) on the roles of feminism and state surveillance in the work of Christa Wolf (De Gruyter 2018), on colonial and socialist histories in Jenny Erpenbeck’s contemporary refugee novel Go, Went, Gone (TRANSIT 2020), and on the transnational postal art of the exiled Chilean artist Guillermo Deisler (Aisthesis 2022). Horakova is also Project Researcher at the Getty Research Institute (project title “On the Eve of Revolution: The East German Artist in the 1980s”), where she is currently involved in a planned exhibition series.
Horakova has taught courses on German-speaking literatures and cultures from 1750 to the present, with specific foci on the social roles of literature in modern and contemporary Germany, cultures of the Cold War, German-speaking literature of migration, and the intersection of literature and technology.
