A native of Dublin, Mark Harman is currently Chair of Modern Languages and Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He has also taught German and Irish literature at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Franklin and Marshall, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Kafka scholar and literary translator. He has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature, translated Hermann Hesse's selected letters, Soul of the Age, various works by contemporary German-language authors, and (with Walter Arndt and others) the volume Robert Walser Rediscovered, which he also edited. He is also the author of Kafka's first novel Amerika: The Missing Person, due out from Schocken Books in November, 2008.