Judith Walkowitz

Professor
Modern European cultural and social history
with special interest in Great Britain, comparative
women's history

The Johns Hopkins University
Department of History
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218

Telephone: 410-516-8599
E-mail: jrw1@jhu.edu

Office Hours:  Tuesday 2:30-5:30 and by appointment

Curriculum Vitae

I have been an energetic impresario for innovative approaches to historical scholarship, as well as a promoter of the interest of female scholars within the historical profession. I was a founding history editor of Feminist Studies, and over the years I have served as member of numerous program committees of the Berkshire Conference. In addition, I have chaired the AHA committee on women and have served as President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians from 1987-1990. During the eighteen years that I taught at Rutgers University (1971 1989), I helped to develop the Rutgers graduate program in women's history into one of the premiere programs in the country. As professor of history and director of women's studies at Johns Hopkins University (1989-1997), I continue to collaborate with other colleagues in promoting intellectual exchange across disciplines.

I am a European historian, whose national focus is Great Britain. I have excellent contacts in Great Britain and in other European countries, and my publications have been translated into five European languages. At Hopkins, I have offered graduate fields in Victorian Culture and Society, Comparative Women's history, and Consumer Culture in historical perspective. I am also developing both a teaching and research interest in transnational culture and the British Empire. I have been teaching graduate students since 1974, and virtually all the students I have supervised in British history are currently holding academic posts (at Wesleyan University, University of Michigan, University of British Columbia, Carleton University, to name a few).

Research and Writing:

For the past thirty years, my research and writing have concentrated on nineteenth-century political culture and the cultural and social contests over sexuality. My first book, Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980), examined the system of medical and police regulation of prostitution, a system first established in 1864 and abolished in 1886, to control the spread of venereal disease among enlisted men. My book investigated the police, medical authorities, and public officials who were the architects and administrators of the system; the alliance of feminists, radical workingmen and middle‹class moral reformers who successfully lobbied for its repeal; and the prostitutes and their community whose lives came under police control and public scrutiny. Along with Alain Corbin's, Les Filles de Noce, Prostitution and Victorian Society opened up prostitution as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry. In addition, it forcefully contributed to an emerging feminist history, to working-class history, to the history of medicine. and to the history of the Victorian state and pressure-group politics. Methodologically, the book combined the strategies of social and cultural history.

City of Dreadful Delight (1992) continues to explore some interpretive questions suggested by, but left undeveloped, in my earlier study. In Prostitution and Victorian Society. I was able to call into question certain myths about prostitution handed down from the Victorian era: that prostitution was a question of working-class supply and middle-class demand; that prostitutes were social outcasts, irrevocably cut off from a community of the laboring poor; that the wages of sin were death. Yet these myths compelled the attention of men and women across class lines and powerfully ordered people's experiences and their own self-representations.

City of Dreadful Delight maps out a dense cultural grid through which these compelling representations of sexual danger, including W.T. Stead's expose of child prostitution and the tabloid reporting of Jack the Ripper, circulated in late-Victorian London. The book moves decisively into the domain of cultural history, and it tries to resolve some of the epistemological and narrative challenges involved in writing cultural history [see Sarah Maza's assessment of my methodology in "Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History." American Historical Review (101(5) (Dec. 1996)]. It identifies the 1880s as a formative moment in the production of feminist sexual politics and popular narratives of sexual danger. It tries to show how late-Victorian sexual politics and narratives existed in dynamic relation to each other both articulating and managing, in different ways, challenges to class, gender, and ethnic relations. Despite their unprecedented political intervention around sexual matters, Victorian feminists did not operate as autonomous cultural actors, as interrogatory voices outside of power or outside of the system of cultural production that generated mythic stories of sexual danger. Instead, I try to show how late-Victorian feminists participated in a cultural dynamic that circulated and amplified stories of sexual danger in a market culture with contradictory political effects.

This line of inquiry emanates from intellectual and political debates of the late-twentieth century. The pornography debate among feminists in the early 1980s provoked me to confront thorny and unresolved problems about the power of representation and feminists' relation to cultural production. Equally provocative and unsettling were the epistemological challenges posed by poststructuralist critics, who insisted that historians pay closer attention to the "complex way meanings are constructed and cultural practices are organized," in particular, the rhetorical, linguistic means by which "people represent and understand their world."

By considering these questions historically, City of Dreadful Delight engages in a productive dialogue with poststructuralists, reformulating their insights about cultural meanings to address analytic categories conventionally of interest to the historian: power, agency, and experience. In this book, I draw a cultural map that resists the conceptual oppositions that traditionally inform historical interpretation: representation and reality; elite and popular culture; the creation/reception and production/consumption of cultural texts. I posit instead a more complex interaction of cultural worlds. I stress a particular version of modernity, one that highlights a fractured , heterogeneous public sphere, where a range of social actors, including women and working people, used the public spaces of the metropolis to assert themselves in the public domain. These social actors reworked and revised the dominant literary mappings of the metropolis to accommodate their own social practices and fantasies.

In my new project, "The Cultural Geography of Central London (1880-1940)," I concentrate on a particular built environment, Soho, London and its boundaries, and the diverse cultures of modernity and modernism that it helped to stage. This new project investigates the artists, performers, novelists, journalists, social investigators and photographers who participated in the refashioning of central London as the showcase for a socially diverse and cosmopolitan urban culture. Resides the image makers, I also chart the formative role played by corporate interests, structures of state, and systems of transport that both policed and promoted a new public landscape. Finally, I examine how different social constituencies who lived, worked, and entertained themselves in Central London produced their own cognitive maps of the cosmopolitan spaces of the city center.

In this book-length project I investigate the remaking of London's West End as a second business district devoted to the business of pleasure. Most of this commercial developments occurred along the five thoroughfares of the West End: Regent street, Oxford street, Charing Cross Road, Shaftsbury Avenue, as well as in the Leicester Square area. Along with Leicester Square, these boulevards formed the boundaries of Soho, a proletarian and foreign district located at the eastern edge of the West End. At first glance, Soho offered a stark contrast to the broad thoroughfares, monumental architecture, and new palaces of consumption under construction around its perimeters.Whereas the boulevards of the West End were undergoing a tidy modernization, fin de siecle Soho retained its old and "declining" environment: its street patterns dated from the seventeenth century, its housing stock from late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Heavily capitalized and luxurious commercial emporia and theatres sprouted along its borders, but Soho's industries remained small-scale, family-owned services and trades. Another important difference were the two forms of "cosmopolitanism" associated with these contiguous spaces: while the pleasures of Oxford street and Leicester Square offered consumers and patrons a stylized form of imaginative expatriation, associated with privileged mobility, Soho provided a refuge to cosmopolitan masses, economic and political refugees from Europe--who seemed ,to many British observers, to epitomize all the dangers of the unplaced--deracination, hybridity, displacement, and racial degeneration.

However 'firm' these boundaries appeared to be, they were always porous and permeable and they were increasingly transgressed. The new thoroughfares of Charing Cross Road and Shaftsbury Avenue helped to open Soho to commercial development. By the 1890s, adventurous "wanderers" and West End "toffs" regularly crossed the boundaries into Soho, just as many of Soho's denizens--he foreign prostitutes as well as the foreign artisans--crossed Out of Soho's "dark, labyrinthine" streets and alleys to service the illuminated zones of the West End. Thanks to the efforts of Soho journalists, who publicized Soho's culinary pleasures and the enterprise of foreign restaurateurs, Soho emerged as a revitalized "London's Latin Quarter," a site for sleazy and bohemian male pleasures.

Between 1890 and 1940, Soho and its surrounding boulevards were spaces where transnational cultural influences most dramatically materialized in London, in the form of foreign restaurants, dance halls, department stores, cinemas. In the turn of the century West End, even the Music Hall, that quintessentially English institution, had refashioned itself as variety theatre, incorporating novelty acts and genres from abroad. Throughout this period, contemporaries were acutely self-conscious about the increasingly international status of London and of its susceptibility to foreign cultural imports, which they tended to assign to generic geographic zones --American, European, Imperial--each carrying radically different valences. The coding of practices, objects, environments and people as "foreign" often turned out to be complete fictions. as in the case of "orientalist dancing," or syncretic and hybrid developments, as in the case of Soho's Italian restaurants.

By exploring the cultural geography of central London, this project makes a number of contributions to the history of London and to the broader historical scholarship on modernity, modernity, and transnational culture. It offers the first detailed study of Central London, one that examines how large-scale movements of culture and capital played themselves out in the built environment of Soho and its boundaries. It also expands on the scholarship on aesthetic and popular modernism pioneered by T.J. Clark, Lisa Tickner, and Peter Bailey. Rather than simply identifying the interplay of high and low modernisms in the center, I will follow Bailey's suggestion that scholars "think of a diverse family of modernism in constant circulation and exchange, their disparities reconciled in a common search for an aesthetic language in which to capture, comprehend, and indeed, exploit the modern experience." I intend to do this with careful attention to the play of local and international in the "modern experience."

I envision the book as a series of interconnected case studies that highlight the uneven processes by which transnational cultural elements--American, European, Imperial--were absorbed and represented in the commercialized culture of the center. In so doing, the book interprets the effects of transnational culture as a process that neither erases national differences nor produces a global homogenization. Furthermore, it demonstrates the ambivalent responses to cosmopolitanism on the part of different social groups of Londoners, for whom the imagined foreignness of central London engendered fantasies of escape and pleasure as well as anxieties of dislocation and deracination. Finally, because the question of cosmopolitanism, in both historical senses, remained a compelling concern from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. I have followed a periodization that stresses cultural continuities between the prewar and interwar period, rather than one featuring a radical break precipitated by World War I. Although the case studies are thematically organized, their order in the book marks a progression from the late l88Os to 1939.

I have published two articles from this new project. They include "Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London," Representations 62 (Spring 1998): 1-30 and "The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London," Victorian Studies 42 (Autumn 1998/1999): 3-46.

Course Material:

-History of Women & Gender Graduate Field Bibliography

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