Mark Baker - School of Historical Studies Staff

Personal History

Mark Baker is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the School of Historical Studies. He completed his D.Phil at Oxford University and was twice a Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before moving to Monash, he was a lecturer in Jewish history at the University of Melbourne and has taught widely in the field of Modern Jewish History, the Holocaust and Genocide, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and Terrorism in Modern Conflict. He is the author of The Fiftieth Gate (HarperCollins, 1997), a personal book about memory of the Holocaust which was the recipient of numerous prizes and is taught on the NSW curriculum for HSC English studies. For more than a decade he edited Generation, a quarterly journal of Australian Jewish thought, and is a regular columnist for the Jewish and wider media. He is currently writing an historical novel and researching in the area of sexuality during the Holocaust.

Current Research

Major Publications

Academic Publications
M. Baker, The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory(HarperCollins, 1997)

Jews, Gardens, God and Gays: Essays in Honour of John Foster, edited by M. Baker (Melbourne University History Monographs, 1996)

Tales Told Out of School: A Scopus Anthology, edited by M. Baker (1996).

"Image Before My Eyes: Poland in the Mind of Jews." Menorah 3 (Nr. 1, July 1989) 6-21.

"The Reassessment of Haskalah Ideology in the aftermath of the 1863 Polish Revolt," Polin: A Journal of Polish Jewish Studies 5 (1990) 221-250.

"Review of Gal-Ed," Polin: A Journal of Polish Jewish Studies, 5 (1990) 464-67.

"Imagining the Jewish Nation: Midrash, Metaphor and Modernity in Ha-Magid, a Hebrew Newspaper," Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 15 (Nr. 1, January 1995) 5-32.

"The Voice of the Deserted Jewish Woman, 1867-70," Jewish Social Studies, Volume 2 (1995) 7-32.

"The Body in the Library: Jewish People, Jewish Texts," edited by M. Baker, Jews, Gardens, God and Gays: Essays in Honour of John Foster (Melbourne, 1996) 117-141.

"As If: Born Under the Sign of the Shoah," in New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics & Culture, eds., M. Fagenblat et.al (Melbourne, 2006) 249-261.

Media
"The State of Israel," The Age, 8 May 2009
"Let the Rivers Run Dry," The Age
"The War of Ideas," AJN, April 25 2008
"Telling our Stories," The Age, 16 April 2008
"Once Upon a Jew," October 19 2007
"The rabbi takes a walk on the wild side," AJN, 13 July, 2007
"The heartbreaking cry of abandoned agunot," AJN, 15 June 2007
"Dreaming of a divided Jerusalem," AJN, 17 May, 2007
"March of the Living, flaws and all," AJN, 20 April 2007
"Jewish impressions of 'Jenocide' in Rwanda," AJN, 23 March 2007
"A few facts in the service of gross distortion," AJN, 22 February 2007
"All racial roads lead to Johannesburg," AJN, 1 December 2006
"Our blood, and theirs," AJN, 3 November 2006
"If the boot was on the other foot," AJN, 6 October, 2006
"Israel vs Hezbollah: a war with no name and no song," AJN, 7 Sept 2006

Areas of Research & Supervision

The Holocaust, Rwanda, genocide, conflict and reconciliation, terrorism and counterterrorism, Arab-Israeli conflict, East European Jewish history, Polish-Jewish history, history of antisemitism, contemporary Jewry.

Teaching

HSY2/3580 - Holocaust and Genocide
HSY2/3145 - History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
HYM4290 - Holocaust Memories