Before taking up a post in Comparative Literature at Kent in 2007, Schaffner studied General and Comparative Literature and English and American Studies in Berlin. She completed both her MSc and her PhD on avant-garde literature at the University of Edinburgh. During and after her PhD studies, she worked first as research assistant and then as Post-Doctoral Researcher in an AHRC-funded project on the European Avant-Garde in art, literature and film.
Anna Katharina Schaffner has published a monograph on language dissection in avant-garde, concrete and digital poetry, as well as a range of articles on Dada, post-war concrete and contemporary digital experimental poetry.
In the autumn term of 2010, Schaffner is the Sylvia Naish Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London. She is a member of the Centre for Modern European Literature at Kent and a Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded 'Beyond Text' project Poetry beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition, investigating in issues related to the cognitive processes involved when reading and interpreting space in visual poetry.