Dr Hannah Ewence is a Rothschild Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Humanities at the University of Southampton.
I joined the Department of History as the Rothschild Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 2011 after completing a PhD at the university in 2010.
My current project explores the suburbanisation of British Jewry during the twentieth century, tracing the changing nature of life styles, race relations and the origins of British multiculturalism as Jews and others exchanged the inner city for life in the urban peripheries. Against this broad backdrop it focuses specifically upon the experiences of Jews in suburbia in the immediate post-war years, during the time of the Palestine crisis (1945-8) and as Britain sought to rebuild and remodel herself in the wake of the Second World War and decolonisation.
My doctoral research explored responses to Eastern European Jewish immigrants arriving in Britain in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, tracing how those responses varied across different mediums, such as the press, fiction and within political debates, as well as across time (1881-2006) and space (Eastern Europe to the London suburbs). This multi-disciplinary project was particularly concerned with how notions of ‘Britishness' were articulated, tested and re-moulded by the presence of the immigrant ‘other', as well as how immigrants came to regard the process of relocation, assimilation and the hybridisation of their ethnic identity. The main approach of this thesis traced cultural and social-political representations of alien Jews generated in Britain as they travelled from small towns in the Russian Pale of Settlement to the East End of London, and then ultimately, by the second and third generation, settled in the suburbs of north London.
I teach in the areas of modern Jewish history and culture, with a particular emphasis upon British and British-Jewish history; the history of race and race relations; migration and assimilation; and gender and the holocaust.