Eva-Marie Kröller was born in Germany, and earned her undergraduate degree (Staatsexamen) at the University of Freiburg, and her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Alberta. Following appointments as sessional lecturer, SSHRC postdoctoral fellow, and visiting professor at UBC's Department of English between 1978 and 1983, she joined the Department in 1984 as an assistant professor; she was promoted to associate professor in 1987, and to professor in 1993. She specializes in comparative Canadian and European literature, with an emphasis on travel writing, literary history and cultural semiotics. She was chair of the comparative literature programme at UBC from 1990 to 1995, and served as editor of Canadian Literature from 1995 to 2003, for which she won the 2004 Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Professor Kröller has been appointed an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (1987-88), a Killam Faculty Research Fellow (2009), and Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin (1992), and at the Nordamerikaprogramm, University of Bonn (2001). She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2007. She has also won several UBC awards: the Killam Research Prize (1995), the Killam Teaching Prize (1999), and the Dean of Arts Award (2002). She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2022.