Rachel Lichtenstein

Rachel Lichtenstein is Reader in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she co-directs the Centre for Place Writing, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Jewish Studies. An artist-turned-writer, she has spent three decades producing books, digital heritage projects and community-engaged artworks that explore urban memory, Jewish settlement and the poetics of place.

Education and training: Originally trained as a sculptor, Lichtenstein later moved into archival and literary work; formal degrees are not detailed in the supplied text.

Research interests: Her praxis combines creative non-fiction, oral history, digital mapping and site-specific art to investigate Jewish diasporic landscapes in London, Manchester and the Caribbean. Key themes include memory, identity, vanished streets, synagogue heritage and the lived experience of migration.

Publications trend: Since 1999 she has published a sequence of hybrid literary works—Rodinsky’s Room, On Brick Lane, Diamond Street, Estuary—alongside refereed articles that fuse urban archaeology with cultural geography. Recent outputs foreground digital memory maps and the spatial humanities, reflecting a methodological shift towards publicly engaged, openly accessible heritage platforms.

Grants & projects: She has secured major awards from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Bartlett Materialisation Grant (£50k) and Jewish Historical Society of England for initiatives such as Memory Map of the Jewish East End and Our Hidden Histories oral-history archive.

Teaching & supervision: Lichtenstein teaches creative non-fiction, place writing and novel workshops on BA and MA Creative Writing programmes at Manchester Met and currently supervises multiple practice-based PhD candidates exploring place through text and image.

Affiliations & outreach: She serves on the International Advisory Panel of the Foundation for Jewish Heritage and the Collections Advisory Network at London’s Jewish Museum, curates literary festivals, and contributes regularly to BBC radio and national newspapers.