Historians in Conversation, episode 28 - Prof. Leona Toker

Historians in Conversation, Episode 28

Prof. Leona Toker

How do historians build their career, what motivates them and how they deal with professional and personal challenges? What shapes their professional path? Prof. Michael Green from the Faculty of Philosophy and History welcomes you to his podcast, where he will be inviting interesting guests to explore their stories.   

Prof. Leona Toker is Emerita professor at the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and is literary scholar, who is interested in literary history. Born and raised in Vilnius, having finished her Masters’ degree, together with her family she made aliya (immigrated) to Israel, where she became a PhD student and later received her employment at the Hebrew University. The conversation revolves the questions of academic career and emigration – how these two match, how an immigrant finds a job in the new country. Another aspect of discussion is the antisemitism experience by Soviet Jews at the hands of the government and the ways in which it could be attempted to deal with. Finally, the topic of the functioning of the academia, its job distribution is brought under scrutiny.

Leona’s publications include:

Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Cornell University Press, 1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (University Press of Kentucky, 1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Indiana University Press, 2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (Ohio State University Press, 2010), Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (Indiana University Press, 2019).