Nicolas Turner is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Nicolas Turner

Fields of interest

• American studies
• 20^th to 21^st-century American literature
• Jewish American literature
• Literary criticism
• Identity 
• Race
• Gender and sexuality
• Postcolonial theory
• Literary institutions
• Affect theory

Research

My PhD project examines post-war Jewish American literature as a lens on the shifting relations between ideas of racial, sexual, and gender identity and the institutional formations and critical approaches of academic literary studies between the 1950s and the present. In particular, I focus on works by Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth in order to explore ways in which the changing identitarian-inflected concerns of the university influenced the literature of this period, how shifting understandings of Jewishness shaped the theoretical frameworks and institutional arrangements underpinning academic criticism, and how and why the various versions of Jewishness these writers represented, portrayed, and performed came to resonate – culturally, commercially, and intellectually – in the ways they did.

Supervisors: Prof.dr. P.T.M.G. Liebregts and Dr S.A. Polak

Curriculum vitae

• 2024-Present: Leiden University – Centre for the Arts in Society, PhD Candidate
• 2022-2023: Leiden University, MA (cum laude) in North American Studies
• 2012-2013: University of Cambridge, MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History
• 2009-2012: University of Oxford, BA (Hons) in History and Politics

Selected publications

• “Jews on campus: Zionism, postcoloniality, and history in Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 45, no. 1 (2026): 1-36.
• Review of Karolina Krasuska, Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2024) in Studies in American Jewish Literature 45, no. 1 (2026): 81-84.  
• “Making Sense of America’s Post-war Racial Landscape: the ‘Desire for Jewishness’ in Philip Roth,” LEAP 3 (2023): 199-217.
•  “The uses and misuses of nostalgia in Omeros and Herzog: struggling with diaspora, modernity, and identity in Derek Walcott and Saul Bellow,” The New Scholar 1, no. 2 (2023).
•  “The Asian American Movement: Vietnam, the U.S. Empire, and the Construction of Asian American Racial Identity, 1968-1972,” Netherlands American Studies Review 4, no. 2 (2023): 16-28.

Conferences

• Conference paper: “The university and regimes of migration in Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan: academics, borders, and refugees,”  European Association of American Studies conference 2026, University of Bologna.
• Conference paper: “Beyond allegories: cultural capital, the literary marketplace, and the Russian spectre in Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith,” conference on ‘Post-Soviet Jewish Writing in Germany and North America,’ University of London, 2026.
• Conference paper: “Periodizing Soviet Jewish identity and global capital in Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan; or, historizing contemporary US literary studies,” Historical Materialism Conference 2025, London.
• Conference paper: “Jews on campus: Zionism, postcoloniality, and history in Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus”, Association for Jewish Studies 56th annual conference, Online (United States), 2024.
• Conference paper: “Jews on campus: Zionism, postcoloniality, and history in Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus” European Association for Jewish Studies conference on ‘Jewish Literatures, Places, and Heritage’, Online (Rome), 2024.
• Conference paper: “Jewishness and the desire for identity: race, sex, and gender in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant,” British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies annual conference, University of Bristol, UK, 2024.
• Conference paper: “Jewish Otherness in Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: race, Zionism, and the possibility of escape from Jewish American clichés,” European Association of American Studies conference, Amerikahaus Munich, 2024.

Teaching and editing

• Lecturer in 26-27 for the course ‘Histories of Gender and Sexuality,’ a part of the Minor ‘Gender and Sexuality in Society and Culture,’ Leiden University.
• Lecturer in 25-26 for the course 'Contemporary Visions of Gender and Sexuality,’ a part of the Minor ‘Gender and Sexuality in Society and Culture,’ Leiden University.
• Second reader for dissertations in 25-26 for the MA Media Studies, Leiden University.
• Grading papers in 25-26 for ‘Words as Weapons in the USA,’ a part of the Minor ‘Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media,’ Leiden University.
• Editor-in-Chief, Netherlands American Studies Review – 2024-Present
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, LEAP – 2023, 2024, and 2025
• Academic Tutor – 2021-Present
• Freelance editorial consultant – 2022-Present

Prizes and awards

• Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship, University of Chicago (2026)
• Rob Kroes Travel Grant (2026)
• Finalist for the Theodore Roosevelt American History Award (2024)
• AHRC Research Preparation Masters Awards Grant (2013)
• Keith Feiling Prize – Christ Church, University of Oxford (2012)
• P. Hart Prize – Christ Church, University of Oxford (2012)
• University of Oxford Scholarship (2010)
• Gibbs Prize in Politics – University of Oxford (2010)