Stanley Corngold

Stanley Corngold, a graduate of Columbia and Cornell Universities, has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (e.g., Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has translated and written on the work of Franz Kafka. With Benno Wagner and Jack Greenberg, he co-edited, with commentary, a translation of Kafka’s main office writings, which describes the place of these documents in the history of worker’s compensation insurance as well as their importance for an understanding of Kafka’s novels and stories. On his retirement in 2009, Corngold received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton. In fall 2009, he conducted four seminars on his own work at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a Visiting Fellow; in fall 2010, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. Together with Benno Wagner, he published Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine, which again highlights Kafka’s professional experience as an influential insurance lawyer. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

With Michael Jennings, Corngold founded and directed the Princeton Kafka Network with Oxford and Humboldt Universities between 2009-2012. With Ruth Gross, he also co-edited a volume of essays in 2011 on Kafka titled Kafka for the Twenty-First Century; co-edited a special issue of Monatshefte devoted to papers given at the Kafka Network at Princeton in 2010; and translated Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther. Since then, he has published a Norton Critical Edition of the same eighteenth-century novel (2012) and a Modern Library edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2013). In 2018, Princeton brought out his intellectual biography Walter Kaufmann—Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic; and he recently published two new books: The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Weimar in Princeton: Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). His latest book, titled Expeditions to Kafka, consisting of new and selected essays, appeared with Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. He now writes regularly for the journal First of the Month.

Corngold continues to be active on the lecture circuit, having spoken not long ago at Harvard; Brown; University College Cork (Eire); the Tekè Gallery in Carrara, Italy; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft in Berlin, the University of Toronto; and Oxford. In fall 2018 he delivered the Thomas Mann Lecture at the ETH (Zurich); in 2019 he spoke at Dartmouth on the Thomas Mann Family and thereafter, in early 2020, at the MLA in Seattle on Kafka and Insurance Law and in Köln (Cologne) on literary hermeneutics.  He has continued to lecture (via Zoom) on Kafka and Thomas Mann to the Yellow Barn Center for Chamber Music, The Centre for Applied Jungian Studies (Capetown), Friends of the Princeton Library, the Princeton Old Guard, and L.A.S.E.R (Stanford). In December 2024, he will give the keynote lecture at Trinity College (Dublin) on “Kafka & Sex—Revisited.”