Victorian Jewish Literature

This is a live seminar course and enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. The course will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Lorraine Rumson

Did you know that the infamous Jack the Ripper murders took place in a Jewish neighborhood in London? Or that England’s only Prime Minister of Jewish heritage was Prime Minister in the 1870s? Victorian England’s reputation for buttoned-up Anglicanism masks a colorful world of Jewish culture. This course will dive into literature written by Jews in Victorian England as a means to explore this period of Jewish history. We will read authors ranging from Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to first-generation immigrants in late-Victorian London, explore both famous and little-known writers, and ask ourselves how their writing explores the concerns and crises of the nineteenth century, in England and beyond.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Lorraine Rumson is a PhD candidate in English Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where she is researching Victorian Jewish writing about the Middle Ages, following from her MA research on femininity and modernity in Victorian Jewish writing. She is the Network Director of Progressive Connexions, a foundation for interdisciplinary research, where she has been managing the digital shift in the time of COVID-19. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based literary journal FU Review, and an editor at Tint journal for writing by speakers of English as a second language.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save $21 right now, and more on future classes and public programs tickets.