Professor Abigail Green

My first book, Fatherlands: state-building and nationhood in 19th century Germany (2001), explored the tensions between state-building and nationhood in Germany through a comparative analysis of Hanover, Saxony and Wurtemberg. Shortlisted in the 2002 Das Historisches Buch awards.

Since then, my work has taken a number of different directions. I won the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (2010), an exercise in global biography that was named a New Republic Best Book of 2010 and a TLS Book of the Year. As one of the pioneers of the international turn in modern Jewish history, I have also written extensively on Jewish humanitarianism and internationalism, always in conversation with other fields. Together with Vincent Viaene I edited Religious Internationals in the Modern World (2012), which examines this phenomenon comparatively across different religious traditions; more recently, with Jaclyn Granick I edited a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2021) on ‘Gendering Jewish Inter/nationalism’. 

My next book, Liberalism: a Jewish History (forthcoming 2027), deals centrally with the revolutions of 1848 and their legacy across generations, which I trace through revolutionary families. This work has been supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship and a Leverhulme Major Research Project. It emerges from over a decade of collaborative initiatives that have taken me in many different, inter-related directions. In particular, I would mention the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies, which I led with Simon Levis Sullam, resulting in our co-edited volume: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: a Global History (2020).

Working in partnership with colleagues at the National Trust, the AEPJ, Strawberry Hill House and Waddesdon Manor (many of which were sites of Jewish liberal sociability, politics and activism), I am also leading a major collaborative project on Jewish country houses which has both academic and more heritage-oriented dimensions. This work has been supported by the AHRC, the Claims Conference and Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. The book I edited with Juliet Carey, Jewish Country Houses (2024) was a Daunts Book of the Year and a Country Life Architectural Book of the Year.

I welcome proposals from graduates that intersect with any of these broad research interests.

See page on Brasenose College website