Professor Abigail Green
Professor of Modern European History
Brasenose College
01865 (2)77868
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 and the Claims Conference. 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.
Publications
Featured Publication
Jewish Country Houses
(Profile Editions, November 2024)
A unique angle on Jewish and country house history, beautifully illustrated with original photography by leading architectural photographer Hélène Binet.
Through a series of striking case studies this revelatory book explores the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections - and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them.
Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses - properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews - tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe - and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust.
Beautifully illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell that story: from the playful historicism of the National Trust's Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno - and across the Atlantic to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences.
DPhil Students
I would be willing to hear from potential DPhil students regarding: European history in the long 19th century, modern Jewish history.
In the Media
- 11 September 2021 (at 32.15mins) - Turban confusion, Jewish heritage, Hong Kong Christian activists - BBC Radio 4
- 10 October 2014 - ‘The Walhalla Hall of Heroes’, part of Germany. Memories of a nation’ - BBC Radio 4
- 15 March 2012 - ‘In Our Time: Moses Mendelssohn’ - BBC Radio 4, Panel Member