Dr Nadia Valman, BA (Cambridge) MA (Leeds) PhD (London)
Senior Lecturer

email: n.d.valman@qmul.ac.uk

Nadia Valman’s research focuses on two areas: literature and religion with a particular interest in discourses surrounding Jews; and literature and place.

Her first monograph, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2007) examined the philosemitic novel in Britain. Her work seeks to situate representations of Jews within wider debates about politics, culture and nation. She has 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 (2004); (with Eitan Bar-Yosef) The ‘Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (2009) and (with Tony Kushner) Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (1999). She has also edited (with Naomi Hetherington) Amy Levy: Critical Essays (2010), the first collection of essays on the remarkable Victorian Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy. Her co-edited selection of short stories by nineteenth-century Jewish writers in Britain, France and Germany, is published by Stanford University Press in 2013. She is editor of the Routledge journal Jewish Culture and History.

In 2011, Nadia organised a conference at QM on the work of East End writer Willy Goldman and is the co-organiser of a conference on Arthur Morrison in November 2013. In 2010 she co-convened the London Nineteenth-Century Seminar on new approaches to the cultural history of the East End with contributions from scholars in literature, geography and history.

In her most recent publications, Nadia has extended her interest in Jewish writers of London’s East End to look at the broader literary history of the area. She co-edited with Emma Francis a special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century on 'Revisiting the Victorian East End' (2011).

She regularly gives talks on her work in museums and arts centres, including the Museum of London Docklands, Bishopsgate Institute, Battersea Arts Centre, and Rich Mix, Bethnal Green and has appeared on Radio 4 and BBC TV’s The One Show.

Nadia is currently completing two projects, the Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Studies (2013), and British Jewish Women Writers (2014). She is also writing a new book on the literary history of the East End of London.

Postgraduate supervision:

Nadia welcomes research students in any area of nineteenth-century literature, particularly the novel and popular culture, any area of Anglo-Jewish literature, and the literature of London.

She has recently 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)

Publications:

Selected Publications:

with J. Hess and M. Samuels (eds), Nineteenth Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013)

with Emma Francis (eds.), 'Revisiting the Victorian East End', special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no 13 (2011)

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

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

with N. Hetherington (eds), Amy Levy: Critical Essays (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010)

‘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. E. Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 45-64

with Eitan Bar-Yosef (eds), The 'Jew' in late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009)

'The East End Bildungsroman from Israel Zangwill to Monica Ali', Wasafiri, 24.1 (2009), 3-8 doi:10.1080/02690050802588968

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

‘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 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), pp. 111-129

with Bryan Cheyette, The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004)

‘“A Fresh-Made Garment of 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 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002), pp. 62-101

Undergraduate teaching:

In the current academic year, Nadia contributes to undergraduate teaching on:

Postgraduate teaching:

In the current academic year, Nadia contributes to postgraduate teaching on:

LCMM052: Writing the East End