Helena Tomko is associate professor of literature in the Department of Humanities at Villanova University, where she has been teaching since 2008. Her current research is in inner-exile studies and the influence of Catholic thought on early twentieth-century German literature and culture. She has written a series of articles exploring the thought of philosopher, satirist, and diarist Theodor Haecker and his contribution to inter-war German culture. Haecker was an important influence on the White Rose student resistance in Munich during the Second World War, as this short article and this lecture explain.
In addition to her work in German studies, Helena's scholarship and teaching contributes to the field of religion and literature more broadly. Sacramental realism is a key theological and literary concept in her work. She has recently embarked on a study of the role of humor in classic Catholic fiction and the question of why a good laugh is hard to find. This project looks at the mid-century fiction of Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, among others. She discussed the question of what we laugh at and why in this lecture.
Dr. Tomko wrote her doctoral thesis in German literature under the guidance of Professor Ritchie Robertson at St. John's College, University of Oxford. Her book, Sacramental Realism: Gertrud von le Fort and German Catholic Literature in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, was published in 2007.
As an undergraduate, she studied modern languages at the University of Bristol, UK, where she received a first-class joint honors degree in German and Italian. Born in Oxford, she grew up in County Durham. She now lives with her husband and daughters in the Philadelphia area.