Aviv Reich, Pembroke

Biographical Information

I completed a BA in English Language and Literature at Oxford, winning the British Association for Jewish Studies undergraduate prize for my dissertation. I then came to Cambridge to take the MPhil in Criticism and Culture, funded by the Cambridge Trust. I’m now in the third year of my PhD which is funded by the AHRC and the Isaac Newton Trust.

Last year, I was co-convenor of the 20th Century and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar. I've supervised, or am currently supervising: Part IB Paper 7A English Literature 1830-1945, Paper 7B English Literature 1870 to the present, and Part II Paper 1 Practical Criticism and Critical Practice and Paper 16 History and Theory of Literary Criticism. 

Research Interests

I research late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century prose fiction, with a particular interest in how narrative forms relate to social, religious, scientific, and philosophical developments of the period.

My thesis explains the narrative techniques of George Eliot, Amy Levy, Israel Zangwill, and James Joyce as engagements with a thread of Jewish thought which was concerned by how to organise, understand, and experience Jewish history, and with where Jews ought or ought not to live. I characterise these four figures as writers of ‘Jewish prose’ in that they shared a set of formal preoccupations about how to articulate complex Jewish-temporal ideas. In particular, I argue they explored ways of patterning the Jewish past in order to project different futures in writing.