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Heidi Kaufman
Assistant Professor
 An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts (UD Press, 2004)This collection of essays, edited and introduced by Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, raises new questions about Edgeworth’s place in English and Irish history, literary history, and women’s history. This collection focuses on the ways in which Edgeworth’s writing challenged readers to understand her historical contexts as much as it obliged her to confront the politics of her own literary authority. The essays included in this collection focus on the inscription and appropriation of Irish society into British cultural tropes in Edgeworth’s work as she became uncomfortably caught in, and representative of, a nexus of political concerns over the course of her lifetime.
Current Research
1.) Nested Nation: England, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Nested Nation brings to light the role of Jewish discourse in the production of English racial identity and nation formation in the nineteenth century. This study shows that even as novelists imagined English identity as racially homogenous, they quietly undercut and complicated their own logic by drawing English identity from Jewish sources. Nested Nation brings together two fields of literary scholarship: studies in nation and narration and Jewish cultural studies. Since the 1970s, scholars have focused on the relationships between national identities, imperial ideologies, and the political and social role of novels. Nested Nation opens up a space for re-examining old debates about literary anti-Semitism and in the process explores the novel’s role in conciliating the competing claims of racial and national ideologies in nineteenth-century British culture.
2.) Maria Polack’s Fiction Without Romance; or The Locket-Watch (1830)
This project will republish Maria Polack’s novel, along with a critical introduction which situates it within the culture of London’s East End, Jewish women’s publishing history, and ongoing debates in this period concerning the education of girls. This novel is important not only because it is the first novel published by an English Jew, but because it sheds so much light on the role of women writers in the Anglo-Jewish Haskalah, or enlightenment, which this novel helped initiate. Polack imagines an English nation that comes to understand the intrinsic value of educating girls and women as a means of fostering religious toleration and communal cohesiveness. Polack’s novel therefore engages with the effects of modernity on Jewish culture and the role of Jewish women in English society, while also actively arguing on behalf of novels as an important agent in the education of all girls and young women–Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
For more information, see the English Department's faculty profile for Heidi Kaufman.
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