Rate My Professor Leonid Livak

Leonid Livak is Professor, Department Chair, and Graduate Chair in the Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. He holds a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1999), an MA in French language and literature from Middlebury College (1998), an MA in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1996), and a BA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (1993). Livak began his academic career at the University of Toronto in 2001 as Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages & Literatures, advancing to Associate Professor in 2004 and Professor in 2010. Earlier appointments include Assistant Professor of German and Russian at Davidson College and Assistant Professor of Russian at Grinnell College (1999-2000), as well as faculty at Middlebury College's Russian Summer School (1998-1999).

His research interests include 19th- and 20th-century Russian and French literature and culture, modernist studies, Jewish studies, diaspora and transnational studies, and comparative literary and cultural approaches. Livak is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures for In Search of Russian Modernism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). He also earned the Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Arts and Science and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council's Eurasia Program. Key publications encompass monographs such as Histoire culturelle de l’émigration russe en France (Eur’Orbem éditions, 2022), The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature (Stanford University Press, 2010), Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), and How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Livak has edited critical editions like Portrait d’une traductrice: Ludmila Savitzky à la lumière de l’archive (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2025) and A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), alongside numerous articles in journals including The Russian Review and Cahiers du monde russe. His scholarship has advanced understanding of Russian émigré literature, French-Russian interactions, and modernism.