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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). 

Hello and welcome to the 28th episode of my podcast Historians in Conversation, which is hosted by the University of Lodz in Poland. My name is Michal Green and today my guest is Professor Leona Toker. She is Professor Emerita at the English Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and she authored quite a few books related to literary studies but she is also interested in literary history and this is why she is here with us today. The conver...