MERI-JANE ROCHELSON

Professor and Associate Chair of English

Florida International University

Education

1976-82: Ph.D. in English, University of Chicago, with Honors

Dissertation: "George Eliot and Metaphor: Creating a Narrator in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel"; Directors: Wayne C. Booth and Diana Postlethwaite

1975-76: M.A. in English, University of Chicago, with Honors

1971-73: M.A. in Teaching of English, Teachers College, Columbia University (Minor field: TESOL)

1969-71: B.A., Barnard College, with Honors in Political Science

1967-69: Attended Smith College, Northampton, MA

Selected Professional Honors and Grants

Grant, “Identity, Diaspora and Culture,” Transnational and Comparative Studies Center, FIU, 2004

Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship, 2003-04

Women’s Studies Faculty Service Award, 2004

Outstanding Honors Fellow Award, 2002; Senior Fellow in the Honors College, 2005

College of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Awards, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Development Awards, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001

Teaching Incentive Plan Award Recipient, 1994

FIU Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1994

Participant, NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers: "The Construction of the 'New Woman' and the 'New Man' in the 1890s." Directed by Martha Vicinus at the University of Michigan. June-August 1992

Publications

Books:

A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Wayne State University Press, 2008. Paperback edition, 2010.

Children of the Ghetto, by Israel Zangwill (1892). Edited (with introduction, bibliography, and notes) by Meri-Jane Rochelson. Wayne State University Press, 1998.

Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s. Anthology of critical essays, co-edited with Nikki Lee Manos. St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Critical Articles in Journals and Collections:

"Masters and Messiahs: Religion, Sex, and Home in Two Works by Israel Zangwill.” Victorian Review. In press.

“Israel Zangwill: le féministe.” Ces hommes qui épousèrent la cause des femmes. Dix pionniers britanniques (These Men Who Espoused the Cause of Women: Ten British Pioneers). Edited by Martine Monacelli-Faraut and Michel Prum. Les editions de l’Atelier, 2010: 149-62.

“‘A Religion of Pots and Pans’: Jewish Materialism and Spiritual Materiality in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto.” Victorian Vulgarity. Edited by Susan David Bernstein and Elsie Michie. Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009: 119-35.

“Afterword.” Amy Levy: Critical Essays. Edited by Nadia Valman and Naomi Hetherington. Ohio University Press (forthcoming 2009).

“Edith Ayrton Zangwill and the Anti-Domestic Novel.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 36.3 (2007): 161-183.

“The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel E. Wotton: ‘Faithfully Yours, Margaret.’” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 48.3 (2005): 305-23.

"Zionism, Territorialism, Race, and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Israel Zangwill." In ‘The Jew’ in Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa. Edited by Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman. London: Palgrave, 2009: 144-160.

"Israel Zangwill's Early Journalism and the Formation of an Anglo-Jewish Literary Identity." In Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Edited by Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2000: 178-94.

“Israel Zangwill and Women’s Suffrage.” Jewish Culture and History 2.2 (Winter 1999): 1-17.

"'They That Walk in Darkness': Ghetto Tragedies: The Uses of Christianity in Israel Zangwill's Fiction." Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 219-33.

“Teaching Jewish Studies: Israel Zangwill and Children of the Ghetto.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of

Jewish Life and Thought 48.1 (1999): 84-101. [Slightly condensed reprint of Introduction to Children of the Ghetto]

"Bending the Bow: The Verdict (1946) and the Hollywood Victorian Detective." In The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television. Edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998: 85-92.

"Jews, Gender, and Genre in Late-Victorian England: Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25 (1996): 311-28.

"The Big Bow Mystery: Jewish Identity and the English Detective Novel." Victorian Review 17.2 (1991): 11-20.

"Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto." English Literature in Transition 1880_1920 31.4 (1988): 399-412.

"Style and Self-Censorship in George Eliot's First Fiction." FIU Women's Studies Center Occasional Papers Series, 1985.

" The Weaver of Raveloe: Metaphor as Narrative Persuasion in Silas Marner." Studies in the Novel 15 (1983): 35-43. Rpt. in The Critical Response to George Eliot. Ed. Karen L. Pangallo. Critical Responses in Arts and Letters. Westport: Greenwood, 1994. 99-107; as “The Narrator’s Use of Metaphor,” in Readings on Silas Marner. Ed. Barbara A. Goodman. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2000: 164-171; in George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Interpretations Series. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003: 15-26; and, abridged, as “Meri-Jane Rochelson on Metaphor and Narrative” in George Eliot: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Major Novelists Series. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003: 59-63.

Articles on Pedagogy:

“Revisiting the ‘Visitable Past’: Reflections on Wayne Booth’s Teaching after 29 Years.” Pedagogy 7.1 (2007): 37-48.

Short Piece on the Use of Technology in Honors [untitled contribution to a collection]. Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council 3.2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 48.

"'This is My Testimony': Rigoberta Menchú in a Class on Oral History." In Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchú and the North American Classroom. Edited by Stephen Benz and Allen Carey_Webb. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996: 247-57.

Reference and Other Similar Invited Articles:

“Israel Zangwill and Oscar Wilde.” Revised and reprinted from A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (2008): 79-81. The Oscholars, online journal. Special issue on Oscar Wilde and the Jews. September 2010.

“Reaching the Reader in Scholarly Nonfiction.” “From the Masters,” September 2010. Online essay published simultaneously on the websites of Screw Iowa and Bridle Path Press.

“Israel Zangwill, the First Great Chronicler of the East End.” The Cable: The Magazine of the Jewish East End Celebration Society. Issue 10, 2009: 16-20.

“Israel Zangwill.” 300-word article. The Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish History, Religion, and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

“Israel Zangwill.” 200-word article. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. Academia Press, Ghent; British Library; ProQuest, 2008.

“Israel Zangwill.” 1500-word article. Encyclopedia of British Literature. Oxford University Press, 2006.

“Israel Zangwill.” Short reference article in Jewish Virtual Library (2006). http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/zangwill.html

"Israel Zangwill." Long biographical and critical article. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography; Late Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, Second Series. Gale, 1999: 302-15.

"Israel Zangwill." Long biographical and critical article. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography; British Short Fiction Writers, 1880_1914/The Realist Tradition. Gale, 1994: 362-78.

"Zangwill, Israel (1864-1926)"; "Children of the Ghetto." The Eighteen_Nineties: An Encyclopedia. Garland, 1993: 112-13, 695-96.

Reviews:

Review of Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures, edited by Sheila A. Spector. Keats-Shelley Journal. In press.

Review of The Jewess in Nineteenth_Century British Literature and Culture, by Nadia Valman. Journal of British Studies 47 (July 2008): 707–9.

“The BBC Daniel Deronda: A Conversation (With Apologies to Henry James).” Media review co-authored with Kathleen McCormack. George Eliot and George Henry Lewes Studies 44-45 (September 2003): 115-20.

Review of The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America, by Jonathan Freedman. Victorian Studies 45.1 (Autumn 2002): 158-60.

Review of Women's Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination, by S. Lillian Kremer. Criticism 44 (2002): 305-8.

Review of Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, by Linda Hunt Beckman. VIJ (Victorians Institute Journal) 29 (2001): 207-11.

Review of The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England, by Talia Schaffer, and Women and British Aestheticism, eds. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades. Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.1 (2001): 121-25.

Review of The Foreign Woman in British Literature, ed. Marilyn Demarest Button and Toni Reed. Victorian Studies 44.1 (Autumn 2001): 157-58.

Review of Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual, by Heidi Thomann Tewarson. Nineteenth Century Prose 28.1 (Spring 2001): 124-28.

Review of The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England by Michael Galchinsky. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 12.4 (Fall 1999): 59-62.

Review of Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" & English National Identity by Michael Ragussis. South Atlantic Review 62 (1997): 173-75.

Review of Shakespeare and the Jews by James Shapiro. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (1997): 151-53.

Review of The Construction of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1885-1945 by Bryan Cheyette. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (1996): 137-140.

Review of The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, edited by Tony Kushner. Jewish Quarterly Review 86 (1996): 483-87.

Review of Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill, by Joseph H. Udelson. AJS Review [Association for Jewish Studies] 17 (1992): 120-23.

"Mary Shelley's Progeny." Review Article. Science_Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 259-68.

Review of George Eliot: A Writer's Notebook, 1854-1879, and Uncollected Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth. Modern Philology 81 (1983): 86-89.

Conference Papers Read

“Nadage Dorée and The Czar and The Songstress: Self-Performance by a ‘Highly Gifted Young Emotional Actress.’” Presented at the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association, Nashville, TN. November 5, 2011.

"Israel Zangwill Confronts Religion, Sex, and Home at the Fin de Siècle: Jewish Values, Diverse Voices." Presented at the workshop on “Religion and Sexuality in Britain, 1870-1930,” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, August 2009.

“The ‘Greener’ in the Fiction of Israel Zangwill and Abraham Cahan.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Milwaukee, WI, March 2009.

“The ‘Melting Pot,’ the ‘Cockpit,’ and ‘The Principle of Nationalities’: Zangwill's Theater of War and Peace.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Washington, DC, December 2008.

“Musing on the Margin: How The Industrial Muse Opened the Way for Anglo-Jewish Studies.” Presented at “The Future of Victorian Studies: A Conference in Honor of Martha Vicinus,” University of Michigan, April 2008.

“‘A Religion of Pots and Pans’: Jewish Materialism and Spiritual Materiality in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto.” Presented at the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), Victoria, BC, October 2007.

“Israel Zangwill and English Antisemitism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Presented at the conference “Antisemitism and English Culture,” Birkbeck College, London, UK, July 2007.

“Revisiting the ‘Visitable Past’: The Aspern Papers and The Rhetoric of Fiction After 29 Years.” Presented as part of “Continuing to Learn from Wayne C. Booth: A Panel in his Memory.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Salisbury, MD, March 2006.

“Mabel Wotton in Jerusalem: A Hidden Archive Illuminates a Late Victorian Life.” Presented at the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association, Charlottesville, VA, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2005.

“I, Zangwill: The Making of a Transatlantic Anglo-Jewish Celebrity.” Presented as part of the panel “Spectacular Jews: Self-Promotion as Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Culture.” Association for Jewish Studies annual meeting, Chicago, December 2004.

"'Perhaps IZ Stands for Both': The Complicated Zionism of Israel Zangwill." Presented at “Between the East End and East Africa: ‘The Jew’ in Edwardian Culture,” a colloquium organized by the AHRB Parkes Centre for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton, UK, July 2003.

“Edith Ayrton Zangwill: Finding the New Woman in the Daughter and Wife.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Conference on British Studies, New Orleans, November 2001.

“Jewish Writers and Jewish Masculinity in Late Victorian England.” Presented at the conference “Locating the Victorians,” London, July 2001.

“Israel Zangwill’s Dreamers of the Ghetto: Jewish History and the Construction of Jews as Europeans at the Fin de Siècle.” Presented at the conference “Textual Intersections in the Nineteenth Century: European Literatures, Histories, Arts,” Cardiff, July 2001. (Also presented at the annual meeting of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Savannah, March 2002.)

“New Women, Jewish Men: Jewish Writers Confront Gender at the Turn of the Century.” Presented at the UCLA/Clark Library conference New Women, Old Men? Debating Sexual Difference in the 1890s. University of California, Los Angeles Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, May 2000.

“Israel Zangwill and Resistance to Modernism.” Paper presented in the seminar “Modernism and Jewish Writers” at the first annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, Penn State University, October 1999.

"'The Mission of Judaism' and Ghetto Tragedies: Defining a Jewish Future in Turn-of-the-Century England." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December 1997.

"'Asiatic Strangers in Their Midst': Jews in 1890s Intellectual Periodicals." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, Chicago, September 1997.

"Dreamers, Dandies, and Jewish Mothers: Gender Issues in Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto." Presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December 1995.

"From 'Marshallik' to 'Ariel': Israel Zangwill's Early Journalism and the Formation of an Anglo-Jewish Literary Identity." Presented at the annual meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 1995.

"Ibsen Revised: Late-Nineteenth-Century British Attitudes and Alternative Endings to A Doll's House." Presented at the Southeastern Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference on "Revivals and Revisions," April 1993.

"Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs: Ethnicity, Gender, and Genre at the Fin de Siècle." Presented at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association meeting, South Bend, Indiana, April 1992.

"Jewish Self-Hatred or Feminist Rage?: Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs." Presented at the Southeastern Women's Studies Association meeting, University of South Florida, March 1992.

"Bending the Bow: The Verdict (1946) and the Hollywood Victorian Detective." Presented at the Hofstra University Conference on Detective Fiction and Film, October 1991.

"The Big Bow Mystery: Jewish Identity and the English Detective Novel." Presented at the MLA Annual Convention, Chicago, December 1990.

"Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto: Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in a Late-Victorian Novel." Presented at the Southeastern Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference on "The Outsider and the Outside View," April 1988.

"Against Type: Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto." Presented at the MLA Annual Convention, New York, December 1986.

"Knowledge, Passion, and Extraordinary Women in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch." Presented at the SAMLA Annual Convention, Atlanta, October 1985.

"Style and Self-Censorship in George Eliot's First Fiction." Presented at the FIU Faculty Women's Studies Colloquia, January 1985.

"The Weaver of Raveloe: Metaphor as Narrative Persuasion in Silas Marner." Presented at the George Eliot Centennial Conference, University of Puget Sound, April 1980.

Invited Talks and Public Lectures

Presentation and discussion about A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Posen Foundation Education Project: Professional Development Seminar for Teachers (“Not Quite Kosher:

Secular Jewish Writers from Kafka to Chabon”). Sponsored by the Posen Foundation and the Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture, University of Cincinnati. Florida International University. February 26, 2012.

Public Lecture, “Zangwill and the Jewish East End.” Presented at Toynbee Hall, London, for the Jewish East End Celebration Society. May 30, 2010.

Public Lecture, “Israel Zangwill: A Jew in the Public Arena.” Presented at the Jewish Museum London, co-sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of England. May 27, 2010.

Reading, A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill . Miami Book Fair International. November 15, 2009.

Book talk on A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Co-sponsored by the Wolfsonian-FIU, the FIU Women’s Studies Center (Women of Distinction Series), and the FIU Program in Judaic Studies. The Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach, January 2009.

“The Melting Pot: A Centennial Look Back at Israel Zangwill’s Play.” The Harry and Marjorie Tobias Lecture, Fall 1008 Jewish Heritage Lecture Series. The George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, November 2008.

Public Lecture. “Israel Zangwill: The First Transatlantic Jewish Celebrity.” Talk presented at a combined program of the Renaissance Group, Temple Sinai of Toronto, and the Sisterhood, Beth Tikvah Congregation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 21, 2008.

“Israel Zangwill and Women’s Suffrage.” Paper presented in a seminar at the University of Southampton, England, in connection with the dedication of the Harry S. Ward Collection at the University library. December 1999.

“Israel Zangwill and his World.” Public lecture presented at the Jewish Museum, London, in connection with the exhibit “‘The Jewish Dickens’: Israel Zangwill and the Wanderers of Kilburn.” December 1999.

"Issues in Reading and Teaching Holocaust Literature." Presented at the Teachers' Institute on Holocaust Studies for the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in cooperation with Broward County, Dade County, and Palm Beach County Public Schools, June 1993.

"Israel Zangwill: A Turn-of-the-Century Anglo-Jewish Celebrity." Presented at the Faculty Lunchtime Symposium, North Miami Campus, FIU, March 1990.

"Women's Studies in the [Middle and Secondary School] Classroom: New Voices, New Questions." Workshop conducted at the Summer Institute for Teachers sponsored by the Florida Endowment for the Humanities, Miami-Dade Community College, July 1989.

"Women and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century Novels." Presented at the Oberlin College Women's Studies Seminar, October 1980.

Media Appearances

Interviewed for and quoted in article, “The Jewish Sylvia Plath? Neglected 19^th-Century Author [Amy Levy] Gets a New Lease on Life.” By Jessica George Firger. The Forward, November 3, 2006: B3; also published as “Books: Interest grows in neglected 19^th-Century female author Amy Levy,” Jewish Journal, Nov. 16, 2006.

Interview subject and consultant for the radio documentary “The Jewish Dickens: Israel Zangwill.” Broadcast January 25, 2004, BBC Radio 3. Pennine Productions, Mark Whitaker, Producer.

Interviewed for and quoted in article, “Return of the Wanderer [An Exhibition of the Life and Times of Israel Zangwill],” By Lawrence Joffe. Jerusalem Report, January 17, 2000: 44-45.

Media appearance representing the Honors College, on FIU in View, program on high-achieving students and the 2002 National Collegiate Honors Council conference, taped and broadcast by WLRN public television, Cable-TAP, December 2002.

Media appearances as Acting Director of Women’s Studies: Brief news event responses on local news shows (WFOR and WSVN Miami); one of two participants in a half-hour interview show, FIU in View: Women’s History Month, taped and broadcast by WLRN public television Cable-TAP, March 2000.

Service to the Profession

President, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, 2007-2012.

Division Coordinator: Modern Jewish Literature, Association for Jewish Studies, 2009-present.

Secretary/Member of Executive Committee, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, 2002-05.

Board Member, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, 1996-2002, 2012-13 (as immediate Past Pres.).

Acting Treasurer, Victorians Institute, Fall 1989, 1992-93, Spring 1995.

Consultant to Ruth Fruchtman, a Berlin writer, on the radio documentary Israel Zangwill: Ein Ghettoträummer, 2002.

Consultant on the exhibit “‘The Jewish Dickens’: Israel Zangwill and the Wanderers of Kilburn.” November 1999-March 2000. Jewish Museum, London.

Manuscript Reviewer (presses and journals in alphabetical order; dates omitted to protect confidentiality, as below): Ashgate Publishing Company, Broadview Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Ohio University Press, University of Missouri Press, Wayne State University Press; Journal of Victorian Culture, Nineteenth Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Studies, PMLA, Shofar, Victorian Studies, VIJ (Victorians Institute Journal),

Referee of candidates for tenure and promotion at several colleges and universities.

Faculty Grant Reviewer at two colleges and universities.
Dissertation Fellowship Reviewer, Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Recent Community Service

" Lithuania: the Florida Connection.” Loaned family photographs to tell my father’s story in a forthcoming exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Florida, Miami Beach.

Book review discussion facilitator: The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson. Temple Sinai of North Dade, North Miami Beach, FL, January 19, 2012.

Book talk on A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Beth Torah Sisterhood, Beth Torah Benny Rok Campus, North Miami Beach, FL. January 23, 2010.

Book review discussion facilitator: The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer. Sisterhood of Temple Sinai of North Dade, North Miami Beach, FL, January 21, 2010.

Panel participant, “Feminism: Then and Now.” Event organized by the FIU Women’s Studies Center in conjunction with the Jewish Museum of Florida, Miami Beach, to complement the exhibit “Judy Chicago: Jewish Identity.” November 5, 2009.

Book talk on A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Temple Sinai, North Miami Beach, FL. February 13, 2009.

Current Memberships

Modern Language Association

Association for Jewish Studies (Division Coordinator: Modern Jewish Literature)

Women's Caucus, Association for Jewish Studies

Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (Past President)

Victorians Institute

North American Victorian Studies Association

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals