Dagmara Kraus-Cavailles

Dagmara Kraus’s academic and creative work bridges critical and creative disciplines and explores the intersections of language(s), poetics, and translation theory, with emphases on 20th century postwar poetry and contemporary translinguality. A graduate of Berlin’s Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and an Ancienne pensionnaire étrangère of the École normale supérieure, Dagmara holds a BA in Creative Writing from Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig, an MA from Université Paris 8 in Modern Literary Studies, and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Freie Universität Berlin. Poetics of the Leap, her dissertation, was published with Urs Engeler in 2023.

Dagmara is the author of several books of poetry, including kummerang (kookbooks, 2012; translated as gloomerang, 2014), kleine grammaturgie (2013), wehbuch (2016), and liedvoll, deutschyzno (2020). She has also published numerous essays, radio pieces, and multimedial works. Her poetry has received praise for its linguistic inventiveness and interlingual play and was awarded multiple prizes, including the Erlanger Preis für Poesie als Übersetzung (2017), Basler Lyrikpreis (2018), Lyrikpreis Meran (2021) Ehrengabe der Deutschen Schillerstiftung (2021), as well as the Oskar Pastior Preis (2025).

As a translator, Dagmara renders Polish, French, and English texts into the German, especially engaging in works that challenge conventions, such as the French Oulipo’s Frédéric Forte’s poetry or the Polish poet Miron Białoszewski’s works. About Białoszewski she wrote the essay Murfla und die Blocksbärte after having published book-length translations of his works (M’ironien and Die Sonne und ich).

Before coming to Princeton, Dagmara taught at universities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and was a Visiting Professor at Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig, at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, and at Schweizerisches Literaturinstitut Biel. From 2021-25, she was an Assistant Professor for Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Hildesheim, one of Germany’s three schools for creative writing, where she specialized in contemporary literary processes. At Hildesheim, she also obtained the equivalent to the German “Habilitation” in 2024. Dagmara joins Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in the German Department in the Fall of 2025.