"Haunted Words: Holocaust Literature at the Intersection of Genres"

Presentation and Panel Discussion

"Haunted Words: Holocaust Literature at the Intersection of Genres"

To attend, please CLICK HERE at 4pm on October 25th.

Featured Presentations:

"'Haunted by Humans': Liminality and Magical Realism in Children's Holocaust Literature"

Joanna Krongold

"Poetry and the Haunted Scholar”

Anna Veprinska

“Filling and Bridging the Gaps: Two Daughters’ Paths to Retrieve, Uncover and Recollect their Mother from Beyond Obliteration”

Sara-Jane Vigneault

Moderated by: Anna Shternshis (Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies) 

Speaker Biographies

Joanna Krongold obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Department of English in 2020. Building upon her master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where she studied literary representations of trauma, Joanna’s doctoral research examined the use of metaphor and figurative dynamics in youth Holocaust literature. Her current project delves into the relationship between genocide and ecocide by applying an ecocritical lens to Holocaust literature. She is currently a Course Instructor at the University of Toronto’s Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and Living and Learning in Retirement, a continuing education organization located in Toronto.

Anna Veprinska is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her book Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) received Honourable Mention in the MSA First Book Award. She has articles published in Contemporary Literature and The Bristol Journal of English Studies and a forthcoming chapter in the peer-reviewed collection Understanding Visitor Experience at Holocaust Museums and Memory Sites. In 2016-2017 she was a Cummings Foundation Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. She holds a SSHRC-funded PhD in English from York University, where she was awarded the Dissertation Prize, and Master’s in English from the University of Oxford. She has also published the poetry collection Sew with Butterflies and the chapbook Spirit-clenched.

Sara‐Jane Vigneault recently graduated with an MA from the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (History) and the Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies. Under the supervision of Prof. Doris Bergen, her dissertation, “Filling and Bridging the Gaps: Two Daughters’ Paths to Uncover their Mother from Beyond Obliteration,” explores the author Irène Némirovsky’s posthumous work Suite française and her daughters’ working‐through processes through archival research and the use of fiction and postmemory literature. Sara‐Jane is also currently working as a research officer at the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation in Germany and she works with Prof. Susan Solomon on her new documentary Après Coup on children of the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide.

Moderator Biography

Anna Shternshis, is the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies and Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (DPhil) from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 ‐ 1939 (Indiana UP, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (Oxford UP, 2017). Together with artist Psoy Korolenko, Shternshis created and directed the Grammy‐nominated Yiddish Glory project, an initiative that brought back to life forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. A recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Last Yiddish Heroes: A Lost and Found Archive of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union” about Yiddish music created in Nazi‐occupied Ukraine.