As part of a year of events marking the centenary of the death of the writer Franz Kafka, Jesus College is excited to announce that it is to host the launch of alumna Professor Leah Tomkins’ new book Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership.
On Friday 7th June 2024, Leah (1983, Classics and Modern Languages) will be discussing her new book in conversation with the journalist and broadcaster Shelagh Fogarty. The event will be introduced by Richard Ovenden, the Bodley’s Librarian, and takes place in the College’s Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub as part of the Hub’s Trinity Term events programme.
Franz Kafka is a writer who seems to crystallise modern understandings of the institutions of work, family, religion and the law, especially when they go awry. Images from stories such as The Trial and The Metamorphosis have soaked into the cultural conversation to such an extent that the expression ‘Kafkaesque’ immediately conjures up a mix of the awful and the absurd.
Prof Leah Tomkins
Challenging the popular view of Kafka as patron-saint of the underdog, and emphasising the significance of his own work as a leader, Leah’s book explores Kafka’s expertise in the exercise of power. Kafka anticipates many of the core themes of leadership – both good and bad – but especially leadership of the populist, ‘post-truth’ kind, where facts are often overpowered by fictions and fantasies. Whether we are leaders ourselves or simply affected by others who make rulings on our behalf, the book offers provocative new ideas about how leading can so easily become misleading – and what we might be able to do about it.
Leah says, “In today’s world, where half-truths and ‘alternative facts’ can inspire people to action, Kafka has never been more relevant. To bring this to life, my conversation with Shelagh will include a discussion of well-known political leaders – not just those who exemplify ‘post-truth’ tactics, such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, but also others, including Barack Obama and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose approaches to leadership also contain fascinating elements of the ‘Kafkaesque’ “.
Early reviews of ‘Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership’ have praised Leah’s ground-breaking analysis, and highlighted the importance of her contribution both to management and leadership studies, and to Kafka scholarship.
‘Full of rich original work, this book has intellectual verve, an admirable sprightly conciseness, and an elegant, unshowy erudition. Tomkins writes so well about issues that have engaged me in the past: Perhaps the great saying of André Gorz applies, when he speaks of the “chaud bonheur” of realizing that someone else “has suffered even more than oneself for the same great cause” – oh, let’s say, “suffered comparably”. Kudos!’
Stanley Corngold, Emeritus Professor of German and comparative literature,
Princeton University, USA
‘Leah Tomkins leverages her expertise and passion as a Kafka scholar to enrich the field of leadership with this truly original and innovative text. Kafka’s stories of transformation, misguided assumptions and fantastical characters provide new prisms through which leadership can be understood in all its paradoxical and subterranean aspects. This is a book that feeds the imagination and lingers long after its final page has been digested. I loved it.’
Donna Ladkin, Professor of Inclusive Leadership, Birmingham Business School, UK
‘This is a fascinating and beautifully expressed book that deserves a very wide readership. Professor Tomkins presents a path-breaking analysis of the nature of leadership and of the led that rests on a novel and scholarly reading of Kafka. Anyone who wants to understand how leadership dynamics constitute, and are constituted by, narratives, individual agency, and the power of the Apparatus should read what she has to say.’
Alan Morrison, Professor of Law and Finance, Saϊd Business School, Oxford University, UK
Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership is published by Edward Elgar Publishing as part of its New Horizons in Leadership series.
TICKETS
Tickets to Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership are free. To book, please CLICK HERE.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Leah Tomkins is an independent writer, scholar and consultant. Academic affiliations include Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian, Oxford and Visiting Professor at the University of the West of England. Her work is proudly interdisciplinary, interweaving issues of leadership, management and organizational behaviour with literature, language and philosophy, and extending these insights into key contemporary debates, such as the advent of AI and the flourishing of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ communication. Drawing on her corporate career, including in leadership roles at Accenture, KPMG, and The Cabinet Office, she specialises in making the most complex of topics accessible and relevant. Leah fell in love with Kafka at the age of 17, when The Metamorphosis was one of her German A Level set- texts. In the decades since, she has read and re-read him, each time seeing new possibilities and provocations for how we live our lives both in and beyond the institutions that seek to define us.
Shelagh Fogarty is a popular TV and radio broadcaster and journalist, currently presenting the weekday afternoon show for LBC. Previously, she presented the lunchtime show for BBC Five Live and alongside Nicky Campbell she co-presented Five Live’s breakfast show where they won multiple Sony Radio Awards. Shelagh’s BBC career included anchoring coverage of the American presidential elections, broadcasting live from St Peters Square in Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II and covering the devastation of the Boxing Day tsunami from Thailand. A compassionate and thoughtful journalist, Shelagh was invited to cover the live service at Anfield marking the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, and has reported on the James Bulger murder trial and the Madrid train bombings. With her intelligent, sometimes irreverent sense of humour, Shelagh has a knack for making politics and hard-hitting news stories accessible and engaging.
THE VENUE
Entrance to this event is via the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub entrance on Market Street, Oxford (opposite Wagamama). Lift access is available to all floors. If you have any questions about accessibility or other support requirements for this event, please contact digitalhub@jesus.ox.ac.uk.
*Filming and photography will be taking place during the event. If you do not wish to be photographed, please notify a member of the Hub team on arrival.
The launch event for Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership is generously supported by ROUNDHOUSE FINANCIAL SERVICES (LONDON) LIMITED.
