Saskia Ziolkowski explores modern Italian literature from the perspective of its understudied relationship with German-language literature. Her dissertation, “Trieste and the Migrations of Modernism: Fin-de-siècle Austria in the Italian Literary Landscape,” investigates these relationships through the lens of a single city. Her new project, “Kafka’s Progeny: For a New Genealogy of Modern Italian Literature,” adopts a larger viewpoint. Whereas most studies of modern Italian literature delimit a canon based on chronological or geographical criteria, “Kafka’s Progeny” uses Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance to map a distinct but unexamined Kafkan tradition in Italy. This approach connects lesser-known and major Italian figures, such as Italo Svevo, Elsa Morante, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, all of whom acknowledge Kafka as a particularly fascinating, influential, or beloved writer. From the use of animal imagery and oppressive spaces to representations of crises, alienation, and repressive bourgeois relations, the disparate themes of Kafka’s fiction are reflected throughout the peninsula’s literature.