Sarah Gracombe

Short Biography

Drawing on literary studies of the novel, historical studies of nineteenth-century Britain, and Jewish studies, Sarah Gracombe's research investigates what Victorian representations of Jewishness reveal about Victorian national identity. She is currently at work on a book entitled Cultural Englishness and the “Homeopathic Dose”: Jewishness in the Victorian Novel. A chapter of this project about Trilby and cultural conversion appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature; another on “Victorian Jews for Jesus” was recently the subject of her invited talk to the Harvard Humanities Center's Victorian Literature and Culture seminar. She earned a BA in English and Art History from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she received fellowships including a Whiting Foundation Fellowship and a Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Dissertation Grant. Since earning her doctorate in 2005, she has been an assistant professor of English at Stonehill College. Her teaching interests include the novel, the construction of national identity, and psychology, aesthetics, religion, and race in Victorian discourse.