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

Public engagement has a key role in my work as an academic. I hugely enjoy developing new ways to open up my research to broader audiences through public talks, collaborations and new media. 

I have developed a successful series of public walking tours, based on my research on Victorian literary texts. These include Shoreditch through the eyes of urban realist novelist Arthur Morrison, a night walk in Soho, Jewish and South Asian encounters in the pre-war East End, Victorian Wapping. My walks have run at literature festivals and in partnership with Tower Hamlets council and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. In 2017-18 I collaborated with the Migration Museum Project to produce ‘Migrant Literature Walks’ exploring different London neighbourhoods through the eyes of migrant writers. In 2023 I produced a new walking tour on Jewish literature and song in east London with Dr Vivi Lachs as part of our AHRC-funded project ‘Making and Remaking the Jewish East End’. You can see a film about it here. My research on the history of QMUL’s Mile End campus forms the basis for a tour that I have presented for London’s Open House festival. 

I have also produced walking tour apps and audiowalks. I curated material and wrote content for an innovative mobile app, ‘Zangwill’s Spitalfields’ -- a free downloadable walking guide to Spitalfields in the 1890s using Israel Zangwill’s groundbreaking 1892 novel of immigrant life, Children of the Ghetto and a range of visual, aural and textual sources. You can download it from the App Store or explore the website version here. I wrote ‘I am Human’, a walking tour of the London Hospital in Whitechapel, intertwining the stories of Joseph Merrick and the medical and nursing staff of the hospital in the Victorian period. You can download it here. With funding from the British Academy I worked with composer Sarha Moore and audio producer Natalie Steed to create two immersive audiowalks set in iconic East End streets, Ratcliffe Highway and Whitechapel Road in the Victorian period.  

In 2025 I launched The Cockney Yiddish Podcast with Dr Vivi Lachs. The podcast is based on our research on the Yiddish- and English-language literature of London’s East End and includes conversations with writers, performers and historians including Michael Rosen and Miriam Margolyes about London’s Cockney-Yiddish subculture and the legacies of Yiddish in contemporary London. Find out more and download episodes here. The podcast won the Best Culture Podcast at the Independent Podcast Awards 2025 and a Silver award for the Best Independent Podcast at the Lovie Awards 2025. Our producer Natalie Steed also won an Audio Production Award for the podcast. The judges said: ‘This outstanding entry shines a light on a rarely heard community, weaving together powerful archive, music, and memorable characters to create a deeply engaging experience. With warmth and subtlety, it leaves listeners with a sense of discovery and understanding. Produced by a small team, it bursts with humour, energy, and heart.’ 

I have also collaborated with visual artists. In The Last of the London (2018) I worked with the projection artist Karen Crosby using narrative and photographs from the archives of the Royal London Hospital projected onto the hospital’s eighteenth-century building in Whitechapel. You can read about it here. I worked with Karen again on Point of Arrival (2019), a collaboration with the Tower of London which used my research on the Tower as an arrival point for Victorian immigrants to London in an immersive walking tour with projections on Tower Wharf. Our third collaboration, Illuminating Barts North Wing (2025) explored the hidden histories of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. 

In 2017 I worked with musicians, singers and colleague Dr Vivi Lachs to produce the Great Yiddish Parade, a re-enactment of an 1889 march in Whitechapel protesting about working conditions. We used Yiddish song and oratory from the period to recreate the atmosphere of activism in the Victorian East End. You can read about it here. In 2018, we ran workshops in seven east London schools for Year 7 students, reflecting on the history of protest in the East End, learning a local Yiddish protest song and designing banners, chants and speeches for a march. This is a short film about their parade in Whitechapel. 

My further work with schools has included a series of workshops in 2021 at Stepney All Saints School marking the 50th anniversary of Stepney Words, the book of student poetry published by the radical English teacher Chris Searle, prompting his dismissal and the legendary Stepney Schools Strike of 1971. The workshops brought Chris and his former students back to Stepney to work with a new generation of young poets. Watch a film about the project, and the Stepney Words story here. 

I co-curated the sound installation Everything is Different, Nothing has Changed (2023) with Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. The installation by three sound artists, Alastair Levy, Emily Peasgood and Syma Tariq, drew on oral history recordings of Jewish and Bengali migrants to Tower Hamlets from the Archives, newly digitised as part of my AHRC-funded research project, ‘Making and Remaking the Jewish East End.’ 

I regularly give talks on my research in museums and arts centres, including the Museum of London-Docklands, Museum of Liverpool, Manchester People’s Museum, Jewish Museum London, Bishopsgate Institute, Battersea Arts Centre, Rich Mix Bethnal Green, Stoke Newington Literary Festival. I also enjoy speaking about my work to community groups, most recently for the Refugee Tales project, the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, Hendon, the Arbour community centre, Mile End, the Jewish Historical Society of England, the Boundary Estate Fun Palace, Shoreditch, the East London History Society, London Borough of Islington Heritage service, and the Swadhinata Trust, Spitalfields.  

I have appeared on Radio 4’s Making History, Radio 3’s Free Thinking, BBC London News, Radio London’s Robert Elms Show and BBC1’s The One Show discussing the history and culture of the East End. I am an occasional contributor to the celebrated East End blog Spitalfields Life.