Affiliations: Modern Languages & Literatures, German Studies

Karolina Hicke researches modern and contemporary German literature and culture, focusing on German Jewish writing, migration, gender and sexuality, and German-Polish memory cultures. Her current book project, Postmigrant Poetics in New German-Jewish Literature, explores how post-Soviet Jewish writers negotiate cultural expectations through literary form by reading their fiction alongside public commentary and critical reception. She is also developing a second book project on displacement and cultural inheritance in the German-Polish borderlands after 1945, tracing how families remember lost homes and inherited places.

At Swarthmore, she teaches German language and courses on migration and refuge, Holocaust representation, Weimar Berlin, environmental humanities, and fairy tales. Her teaching connects literature, film, and visual culture with archives and museums, inviting students to share their research through creative projects and exhibitions.