Post-Doc, School of Humanities
Thesis Title: Placing the 'Other' in our midst: Immigrant Jews, Gender and the British Imperial Imagination
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Professor Tony Kushner
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About
I am a modern cultural historian researching primarily on Britain and Europe, and am interested in transnational themes and interdisciplinary approaches. My current research explores 'the urban', 'the suburban' and 'the rural' as backdrops in which Semitic discourse and racial representations and antagonisms are played out. Through a comparative consideration of the suburbanisation of ethnic minorities in the postwar era, I will trace the history and concept of multiculturalism, assessing how it has operated in practice within the supposedly conformist and conforming suburban environment.
My previous research explored cultural representations of the Jewish immigrant in Britain in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. Taking 'the Jew' as cultural construct as a starting point, my PhD thesis traced the mutation of representations across time, space and genre, observing that, whilst responses to immigrant Jews were, for the most part,characterised by ambivalence, those responses were also shaped by broader discursive European-wide trends. Thus narratives of empire, degeneracy, feminism and identity were also crucial for understanding images of 'the Jew'.
