Nadia Valman

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, including guided walks, installations and performances in collaboration with musicians and artists. I am currently working on a book on the literature of east London.

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’. In 2024-5 I was awarded an AHRC engagement grant to produce The Cockney Yiddish Podcast (released in 2025).

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).