John Zilcosky

Biography

Prof. John Zilcosky teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he writes about modernist literature, travel writing, colonial cultures and psychoanalysis. His publications include Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism and the Traffic of Writing (winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize, 2003), Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (2008), andUncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis and the End of Alterity (forthcoming, 2015). Zilcosky also writes about philosophy, literary theory and comparative literature (articles on Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Flaubert, Adorno, Celan, Sebald, Hesse, T. S. Eliot, Botho Strauss, Paul Auster, etc.). He serves on the editorial board for the German Studies series at both Continuum Press and Legenda Books, and on the advisory board of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre. Zilcosky’s work has been supported by major grants from Germany’s Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the US Fulbright Program, and the US National Endowment for the Humanities. He is Honorary President of the International Comparative Literature Association’s Research Committee on Literary Theory.