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Staff Profile of Dr. Nathan Abrams

Research profile

I have written widely on transatlantic Jewish film, history, politics and popular culture with specific reference to the United States and the United Kingdom. My current research falls into three key areas:

• Jews, Jewishness and Judaism in Popular Culture, 1990-present.
  This project explores recent and changing representations of Jewishness as ethnicity and religion in contemporary cinema and other forms of popular culture.

• Public Intellectuals and American Culture.
  Ongoing research exploring, theorising and widening the notion of the function of the intellectual in post-war America, with specific focus on Norman Podhoretz, neoconservatives, Commentary magazine, the New York Intellectuals, Arthur Miller and Stanley Kubrick.

• European Jewish Diasporas
  Research into the Jewish Diasporic communities in Europe with a particular emphasis on Scotland and Wales.
  

Teaching

I would be interested in supervising postgraduates in any of the areas mentioned above. I currently supervise the following research students:

• Amy Chambers, The Planet of Apes as History;
• Sharon Churchman-Morris,  Jews in British Film and Television;
• Sion Griffiths,  Stereotypes of the Welsh in Film;   
• Dyfrig Jones, Politics and the Superhero Comic Books:
• Jennifer Krase, The Jews of Bangor and Llandudno;
• Cai Parry-Jones, The Jewish Diaspora in Wales;
• Gerwyn Owen, Jews in Italian Cinema
• Jenni Steele, Washing and Textiles in Film and Television.

I am also responsible for either coordinating or contributing to the following undergraduate and postgraduate taught modules:

• Authorship
• Genre: Science Fiction
• America on Film
• Stanley Kubrick: Auteur
• Jews on Screen
• Arthur Miller
• Modes of Critical and Creative Research
• Film Theory/Film Culture
• Film Language
• Film History

Administrative Roles

• Director of Graduate Studies
• MA Convenor
• Director, Centre for Film Studies
• Deputy Director of the Graduate School of College of Arts and Humanities
• University Senate Postgraduate Committee
• University Environmental Committee
• Research and Knowledge Transfer Committee
• Personal Tutor and PhD Supervisor
• Module Leader

Major publications

1. Jews & Sex. Edited by Nathan Abrams (Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2008). [Online]
2. Containing America: Cultural Production and Consumption in Fifties America. Co-edited: Nathan Abrams, Julie Hughes (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2000; London and New York: Continuum, 2006). [Online]

1. 'Jute, Journalism, Jam and Jews: The Anomalous Survival of the Dundee Hebrew Congregation’, Northern Scotland Northern Scotland 3 (2012), 86–97 Download the article (pdf)
2. ‘Hidden: Jewish Film in the United Kingdom, past and present', Journal of European Popular Culture 1:1  (2010): 53–68. Download the article (pdf)
   
3. The (M)orality of Murder: Jews, Food, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich’. [Word Count: 6000].
4.  ‘Consistently Controversial: Commentary Magazine, 1945 to the Present’, Reconstruction 8.4 (2008). [Online]
5. ‘The Jews of Aberdeen: a revolving door community since 1893 and its antecedents’, Northern Scotland 27 (2007): 147–68.
6. ‘A Significant Journal of Jewish Opinion’?: The Jewishness of Commentary Magazine’, The American Jewish Archives Journal LV:1 (2003): 35-62. Download the article (pdf)
7. ‘From Madness to Dysentery: Mad’s Other New York Intellectuals’, Journal of American Studies 37:3 (2003): 435-451. Download the article (pdf)
8. ‘“A Profoundly Hegemonic Moment”: De-Mythologizing the Cold War New York Jewish Intellectuals’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 21:3(Spring 2003): 64-89. Download the article (Pdf)
9. ‘“Are You Still You?”: ‘Memory, Identity, and Self-Positioning in Total Recall’, Film and Philosophy VII (2003): 48-59. Download the article (Word)
10. ‘“America is home”: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945-1960’, Jewish Culture and History 3:1 (Summer 2000): 45-74. Download the article (Pdf)
11. ‘“Taming Memory”: Themeing America’s East Coast Holocaust Memorials’ (co-written with David Oettinger), 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies 6 (Autumn 2000). [Online]
12. ‘Advertising Freedom: Commentary Magazine and the Cultural Cold War’, Studies in the Social Sciences 36 (May 1999): 65-80.
13. ‘The New York Intellectuals and their City’, Overhere 17:1 (Summer 1997): 1-8.
14. ‘Inhibited but not “crowded out”’: The Strange Fate of Soccer in the United States’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 12:3 (December 1995): 1-17. Download the article (Word)
15. ‘Antonio’s B-Boys: Rap, Rappers, and Gramsci’s Intellectuals’, Popular Music & Society 19:4 (Winter 1995): 1-18. Download the article (Word)

1. ‘Digesting Woody: Food and Foodways in the Movies of Woody Allen’, in Woody on Rye: Re-examining Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen, ed. Vincent Brook and Marat Greenberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, forthcoming).
2. ‘Grassroots Religion: Facebook and Offline Post-Denominational Judaism’ (with Sally Baker and B. J. Brown), in Social Media Religion and Spirituality, ed. Marie Gillespie, David Herbert, Anita Greenhill (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).
3. ‘The Pixelated Jew/ess: Exploring Judaism in Video Games’ (with Isamar Carrillo Masso) in Finding Religion in Digital Gaming, ed. Heidi Campbell and Greg Grieve (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
4. ‘Arthur Miller: Unofficial Cultural Ambassador’, in Divided Dreamworlds: The Cultural Cold War in East and West, ed. Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). Download the article (pdf)
5. ‘The Jew in the Gym: Judaism, Sports, and Athletics on Film’, in Jews in the Gym: Judaism, Sports, and Athletics, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon (Indiana: Purdue University press, forthcoming).
6. ‘“A double set of glasses”: Stanley Kubrick and the Midrashic Mode of Interpretation’, in De-Westernizing Film Studies, ed. Saer Maty Ba and Will Higbee (London and New York: Routledge, 2012): 141-51. Download the article (pdf)
7. ‘“Almost the same, but not quite”: The Jewish Male Body in European Cinema’, in La piel en la palestra: estudios corporales II, ed. Alba del Pozo and Alba Serrano (Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Ediuoc, 2011): 105-13.
8. ‘“My religion is American”: A Midrash on Judaism in American Films, 1990 to the Present’, in Religion in the United States, ed. Jeanne Cortiel, Kornelia Freitag, Christine Gerhardt and Michael Wala. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2011): 209-25.Download the article (pdf).
9. ‘The Da Vinci Code Effect: Leo Strauss, the Neocons and the Paranoid Style’, in The Legacy of Leo Strauss, ed. Tony Burns and James Connelly (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010): 235-52.
10. ‘“A Profoundly Hegemonic Moment”: De-Mythologizing the Cold War New York Jewish Intellectuals’ in The New York Intellectuals and Beyond: Exploring Liberal Humanism, Jewish Identity, and the American Protestant Tradition, ed. Ethan Goffman and Daniel Morris (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009): 17-34.
11. ‘The Jew on the Loo: the Toilet in Jewish Popular Culture, Memory, and Imagination’, in Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, ed. Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009): 218–26. [Link]
12. ‘“More than one million mothers know it’s the REAL thing”: The Rosenbergs, Jell-O, Old-Fashioned Gefilte Fish, and 1950s America’ in Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning, ed. Katie LeBesco and Peter Naccarato (Ithaca, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008): 79-103.
13. ‘Homegrown heroes’: Rap Music, Resistance, and Technology’ in Pop Perspectives: Readings to Critique Contemporary Culture, ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007).
14. ‘“America is Home”: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945-1960,’ in Commentary in American Life, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005): 9-37.
15. ‘“I'll have whatever she’s having”: Jewish Food on Film’ in Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film, ed. Anne Bowers (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 87-100.
16. ‘Celebrating Freedom: American Judaism and the Cold War’ in New Voices in Jewish Thought: Vol. III, ed. Alex Gordon (London: New Voices Publications, 2000): 5-23.

Peer recognition

• 2010: AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award
• 2009: Beacon Public Engagement Award
• 2008: The Marc Fitch Fund
• 2007: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Grant
• 2007: Clore Duffield Foundation Sparks Grant
• 2006: Dorot Foundation Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin
• 2006: The British Academy Small Research Grant
• 2006: Academic Jewish Studies in Europe Small Grant
• 2005: University of Aberdeen College Research Award
• 2005: The Carnegie Trust
• 2003: Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship

  

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