Heidi Kaufman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon and author of English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation and co-editor of Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice (Virginia).
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Comparing the profiles of disparate genres of writing dispersed over a forty-year period (1812 through 1856) was always going to be tricky, but Kaufman handles their complexity with remarkable aplomb. . . Kaufman is excellent throughout on the delicacy of archival work, mediating deftly between the divergent voices and interests that emerge within and around conflicting records of historical events.-- "Victorian Studies" Meticulously researched and theorized, Strangers in the Archive addresses questions germane to specialists in Victorian studies and, more broadly, archival studies. It deepened my understanding of the Jewish East End in the nineteenth century, its imbrication in global networks, and the ways in which archival evidence opens up pathways to important and detailed stories, even when they don't take the form one initially expected. The book is also written in an engaging style, taking the form of a literary detective story, compelling as it moves from obstacle to insight. --Joseph McLaughlin, Ohio University, author of Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot