Robert Lemon

Associate Professor, 19th and Early 20th Century German Literature

Profile

Bob Lemon earned a BA in German at the University of Oxford in his native England and an MA and PhD in German at Harvard. He joined MLLL as an Assistant Professor in 2005.

Dr. Lemon's scholarship focuses on the literature and culture of turn-of-the-century Austria, particularly the works of Franz Kafka. His current monograph project considers the significance of the field of anthropology in understanding the intellectual context and semantic ambivalence of Kafka's stories and novels. This engagement with Franz Kafka also extends to Lemon's other main academic interest: translation. In 2018-2019, he produced an original translation and theatrical adaptatation of Kafka's novel _The Trial_, which was further developed in collaboration with Dr. Joe Alberti of OU Drama and Genoa Davidson, and presented as a full theatrical production in December 2019. The same team is currently in the fall of 2021 working on an audio drama of Kafka’s novella known most commonly in English as The Metamophosis, but which in this version is rendered, perhaps with a touch of chutzpah, as “The Transformation.”

Dr. Lemon regularly teaches classes on turn-of-the-century Austria, German-lanugauge poetry in its cultural context, advanced composition, German Culture and Thought and the capstone or senior thesis course on 20th-century literature and culture. In 2018 he won two OU teaching awards: the John H. and Jane M. Patten Award and the Cecil W. Woods Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.

Link to OU Daily newspaper article on Fall of the Wall Week of Events

Selected Publications

“To the Previously Most Common Bird in the World,” “The Extinct,” “Second Creation” and “Dodo.” Translations from the original German poems by Silke Scheuermann. No-Man’s Land: New German Literature in English Translation. December 3, 2019. https://www.no-mans-land.org/article/to-the-previously-most-common-bird-in-the-world/
“New York on the Danube: The Transatlantic Transference of Habsburg Ethnology and Autocracy in Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person.” Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River. Edited by Matthew Miller and Marijeta Bozovic. Academic Studies Press, 2016. 99-119.
“The Comfort of Strangeness: Correlating the Kafkaesque in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. “ In Kafka for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ruth Gross and Stanley Corngold (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011)
Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011).
“Imperial Mystique and Empiricist Mysticism: Inner Colonialism and Exoticism in Musil’s Törleß,” Modern Austrian Literature 42.1(2009): 1-22.

Education

Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures. Harvard University. 2005.
M.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures. Harvard University. 1998.
B.A. (First class) in Modern Languages (German). Exeter College, Oxford University. 1994.