Professor Nadia Valman, BA (Cambridge) MA (Leeds) PhD (London)

Profile

I’m a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century culture urban culture with special interests in religion, gender and migrancy. I studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Leeds and completed my doctorate at QMUL. I taught at the University of Southampton for 10 years before returning to Queen Mary in 2007. At QM, I’ve developed teaching and public engagement events based on my research on London’s East End. I am currently working on a book on the literature of east London, to be published by Princeton University Press.

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach on:

• ESH126: London Global
• ESH295: London: Walking the City
• ESH279: Victorian Fictions
• ESH394: Writing Modern London
• ESH359: Representing Victorian London

Postgraduate Teaching

I have taught on:

• ESH7038: Writing the East End

Research

Research Interests:

• The literature of London, especially east London
• Literature and space
• Literature and religion in the nineteenth century
• British-Jewish literature

Recent and On-Going Research:

My current research focuses on the literature of east London. In 2011 I published a co-edited special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century on Revisiting the Victorian East End. I have organised conferences on the East End writers Willy Goldman (July 2011), Arthur Morrison (November 2013) and Israel Zangwill (September 2022) as well as a symposium on the Stepney Words controversy (November 2021). I have published articles on the writers Israel Zangwill, Margaret Harkness, Arthur Morrison and Alexander Baron who all produced fascinating writing about east London. I am currently writing a monograph, Literary East London, to be published by Princeton University Press.

This research project has been awarded two research fellowships: a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2014-15) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2019-20). In 2021-23 I was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded research project ‘Making and Remaking the Jewish East End: Language, Space and Time’ which examined the role of literature and popular culture in English and Yiddish in creating ‘the Jewish East End’.

My first monograph, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2007) examined the philosemitic novel in Britain. In this and subsequent work I seek to situate representations of Jews within wider debates about politics, culture and nation. I have also explored the representation of Jews in literature and popular culture in a number of edited books, including (with Bryan Cheyette) The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2004); (with Eitan Bar-Yosef) The ‘Jew’ in Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (Palgrave, 2009) and (with Tony Kushner) Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (Vallentine Mitchell, 1999). My research also concerns writing by Jews: I co-edited (with Naomi Hetherington) Amy Levy: Critical Essays (Ohio University Press, 2010), the first collection of essays on the remarkable Victorian Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy. Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader, my co-edited selection of short stories by Jewish writers in Britain, France and Germany, was published by Stanford University Press in 2013. The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures (co-edited with Laurence Roth), a groundbreaking collection of essays that brings together theory and analysis of Jewish cultural practices across the globe was published in 2014 and a new edited collection of essays, British Jewish Women Writers (Wayne State University Press, 2014).

I’m the co-director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership with Birkbeck, University of London which fosters collaborations between academics and museums, archives and schools, and organises talks, seminars and walking tours for public audiences on topics in radical history.

Publications

Monograph:

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Edited books and journal special issues:

Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures, ed. Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman (Routledge, 2014)

British Jewish Women Writers (Wayne State University Press, 2014)

Nineteenth Century Jewish Literature: A Reader, ed. Jonathan Hess, Maurice Samuels and Nadia Valman (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Revisiting the Victorian East End ed. Emma Francis and Nadia Valman, special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no 13 (2011)

Amy Levy: Critical Essays, ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Ohio University Press, 2010)

The 'Jew' in late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, ed. Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (Palgrave, 2009)

The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (Vallentine Mitchell, 2004)

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews': Perspectives from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (Ashgate, 2004)

Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society, ed. Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (Vallentine Mitchell, 1999)

Articles:

‘Afterlives of Child of the Jago’ in Diana Maltz, ed, Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End (New York: Routledge, 2022), 137-156.

 ‘Home Influence: Jewish Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective eds Federica Francosconi and Rebecca Winer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), 261-284.

‘Whose Law Runs Here? Alexander Baron and the Mysteries of Bethnal Green’, in Susie Thomas, Andrew Whitehead and Ken Worpole, eds, So We Live: The novels of Alexander Baron (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2019), 153-73.

‘Walking Margaret Harkness’ London’ in Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921. Flore Janssen and Lisa Robertson, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 57-73.

‘Jewish Fictions’ in Oxford History of the Novel in English Vol 7 British and Irish Fiction since 1940 ed. by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 347-367.

‘Walking Victorian Spitalfields with Israel Zangwill’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Birkbeck, University of London, 2015) http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.755/

‘From Domestic Paragon to Rebellious Daughter: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Women Writers’, in British Jewish Women Writers ed. by Nadia Valman (Wayne State University Press, 2014), 10-34.

‘Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto (1892)’, in London Fictions ed. Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White (Five Leaves, 2013), 31-41.

‘Bad Jew/Good Jewess: Gender and Semitic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Philosemitism in History, ed. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 149-69.

‘Amy Levy and the Literary Representation of the Jewess’, in Amy Levy: Critical Essays, ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman (Ohio University Press, 2010), 90-109.

‘Little Jew Boys Made Good: Immigration, Anglo-Jewish Fiction and the South African War’, in The ‘Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, ed. Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 45-64.

'The East End Bildungsroman from Israel Zangwill to Monica Ali', Wasafiri, 24.1 (2009), 3-8

‘Between the East End and East Africa: Rethinking “the Jew” in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture’, introduction co-written with Eitan Bar-Yosef, in The ‘Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (Palgrave, 2009), 1-27.

‘“The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met”: Literary Representations of the Jewish Mother’, in For Generations: Jewish Mothers, ed. Mandy Ross and Ronne Randall (Five Leaves, 2005), 58-66.

‘Barbarous and Medieval: Jewish Marriage in Fin de Siècle English Fiction’, in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 111-129.

’“A Fresh-Made Garment on Citizenship”: Representing Jewish Identities in Victorian Britain’, Nineteenth Century Studies, 17 (2003), 35-45.

‘Manly Jews: Disraeli, Jewishness and Gender’, in Disraeli’s Jewishness, ed Tony Kushner and Todd Endelman (Vallentine Mitchell, 2002), 62-101.

‘Women Writers and the Campaign for Jewish Civil Rights in Early Victorian England’, in Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Palgrave, 2000), 93-114.

‘Jewish Girls and the Battle of Cable Street’ in Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society, ed. Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), 181-194.

‘Semitism and Criticism: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Literary History’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27.1 (1999), 235-248.

‘Speculating upon human feeling: Evangelical writing and Anglo-Jewish women's autobiography’, in The Uses of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells (Taylor and Francis, 1995), 98-109.

See also my Queen Mary Research Publications profile

Supervision

I am currently co-supervising PhD projects on the history of heritage in Spitalfields; the history of the People’s Palace in Mile End; and Jewish women and the campaign for women’s suffrage. I welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in nineteenth and twentieth-century literatures of London, religion, gender and place in nineteenth century culture.

I have recently supervised or co-supervised the following successful PhD projects:

• Katie Klein, 'Grace Aguilar’s Historical Romances' (2009)
• Mindy Rubin, 'Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and the Representation of Jews on the Nineteenth-Century Stage' (2012)
• Angharad Eyre, 'Zeal and Sacrifice: The Power of the Female Missionary Discourse for Women and their Writing 1830-1900' (2014)
• Lara Atkin, ‘The Truest Native of South Africa: The ‘Bushman’ in Early Nineteenth Century British and British Settler Culture’ (2017)
• Andrea Thorpe, ‘Cosmos in London: South Africans Writing London after 1948’ (2017)
• Miriam Lawrence, ‘Judaism in the Suburban Home, 1945-1980’ (2019)
• Christine Hawkins, ‘The Novel and Women Police, 1840-1939’ (2020)
• Finnian Gleeson, ‘Heritage, Politics and Identity in East London: Towards a History of Imperial Memory, 1973-2008’ (2023).

Public Engagement

I am currently co-supervising PhD projects on the history of heritage in Spitalfields; the history of the People’s Palace in Mile End; and Jewish women and the campaign for women’s suffrage. I welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in nineteenth and twentieth-century literatures of London, religion, gender and place in nineteenth century culture.

I have recently supervised or co-supervised the following successful PhD projects:

• Katie Klein, 'Grace Aguilar’s Historical Romances' (2009)
• Mindy Rubin, 'Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and the Representation of Jews on the Nineteenth-Century Stage' (2012)
• Angharad Eyre, 'Zeal and Sacrifice: The Power of the Female Missionary Discourse for Women and their Writing 1830-1900' (2014)
• Lara Atkin, ‘The Truest Native of South Africa: The ‘Bushman’ in Early Nineteenth Century British and British Settler Culture’ (2017)
• Andrea Thorpe, ‘Cosmos in London: South Africans Writing London after 1948’ (2017)
• Miriam Lawrence, ‘Judaism in the Suburban Home, 1945-1980’ (2019)
• Christine Hawkins, ‘The Novel and Women Police, 1840-1939’ (2020)
• Finnian Gleeson, ‘Heritage, Politics and Identity in East London: Towards a History of Imperial Memory, 1973-2008’ (2023)