This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the Director of Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University (LSU), the William E. “Bud” Davis Alumni Professor of English, and co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. She has published many articles and three books (most recently, Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, the 2021 SCMLA Book Prize winner) on literature, musical theatre, and the first Jewish woman playwright in English. She loves to read, write, and dance. Weltman is a fellow of Fordham–NYPL Research Fellowship Program in Jewish Studies

When did you first get the idea for your research project? 

I began working on Elizabeth Polack, the first Anglo-Jewish woman playwright, when I was asked to write an article on British women playwrights for The History of British Women’s Writing,1830-1880 (Palgrave, 2018). I decided to focus on five wildly different dramatists. One was the neglected Polack, best known for her melodrama Esther the Royal Jewess, or the Death of Haman! (1835), which was performed in a lively working-class commercial theater located in an East End London neighborhood with a large Jewish population. Set in ancient Persia, the play is usually read as what the nineteenth century dubbed an "Oriental" or "Exotic" melodrama. And so it is. But when I read it, I was thunderstruck: first performed one week before the holiday of Purim, it’s clearly also a Purimspiel—a raucous Jewish folk comedy traditionally performed for the holiday of Purim, which celebrates the biblical story of Queen Esther. It even ends with a scrim that descends at the end of the performance that reads "Purim"! Yet no one had considered what it meant for this play to have drawn a diverse community of Jews and non-Jews together into a commercial theatre to see a play that combines the genres of melodrama (the nineteenth century’s most popular theatrical form) and Purimspiel (a Jewish folk tradition). Further research revealed several plays with Jewish themes by Jewish authors in the 1830s and 40s playing during the Purim season in East End theaters for mixed audiences. I realized that I had a book project in hand. 

What brought you to the Library? 

Preliminary research led me to materials related to Elizabeth Polack and her contemporaries in various collections at the NYPL. I was very excited about the idea of visiting to examine them, and so I applied for a Fordham–NYPL short term fellowship in Jewish Studies.

What research tools could you not live without?

Interlibrary loan.

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

The most unexpected item ever in my career is the content of the earliest play about Sweeney Todd, first written and performed in 1847 at the Britannia Theatre in London’s East End. I was examining the manuscript at the British Library, and I saw that it was in many ways a completely different play from the version that was eventually published in 1883. The big shocker was that the original melodrama is an abolitionist play. It was such a surprise that this story of a mad barber and his cannibal pie-making accomplice incorporated a plot crafted to fight slavery that I put together a scholarly edition published as a special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. You can read about it here.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

I just finished reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a gift from my sister. I don’t know nearly as much about Elizabethan history as I do about Victorian England, so there was plenty to learn from this powerfully written novel. Although I’d remembered that Hamnet and Hamlet were variations of the same name, before this I hadn’t stopped to imagine Shakespeare’s loss of his young son or to dwell on how such tragedy must have impacted his writing of Hamlet—and so much more.

Describe a moment when your research took an unexpected turn.

I’ve described how my project on Elizabeth Polack started as an outgrowth of an article on five Victorian women dramatists. But the unexpected turn was that I was at the time poised to complete my third book, Victorians on Broadway (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Instead, I started down a deep rabbit hole. I became very excited—okay, obsessed—with Polack. Even though I loved working on my Broadway book, I decided to pause for a bit to write an article on the way in which Polack’s blending of the genre of Purimspiel and melodrama helped promote Jewish emancipation in Britain while ushering the first Jewish woman playwright into the profession. But weaving together the strands of Jewish history, women’s history, and genre history with close analysis and interpretation of the play itself turned out to take a long time, delaying my Broadway book by two years—not part of the plan! But the result was worth it: my award-winning essay, “Melodrama, Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation” in Victorian Literature and Culture 47.2 (2019): 1-41, which took the 2020 Nineteenth Century Studies Association Best Article Prize. Victorians on Broadway came out a few months later (and it won a prize, too).

How do you maintain your research momentum?

I love research, so if it were uninterrupted by eating, teaching, and existence in general, the momentum would be easy. But it’s always hard to gear back up after any time away—especially after a thorny work or life problem has blown every thought about the project out of my head. Nevertheless, I know that once I get back in the zone, I’ll get lost in it again.

After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?

Dinner with the family or friends, exercise, TV, reading for fun—and sometimes, more work . . .

What tabs do you currently have open on your computer? 

NYPL's website, of course! Louisiana State University and LSU’s email portal (also, of course), the Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film’s editorial manager, and the East Baton Rouge Parish Library website (to download a borrowed novel onto my Kindle). There are social media pages and shopping pages because, well, I’m a product of my times.

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?

Rabbit holes are fun. And they can lead to amazing finds. Let yourself follow them. But know the difference between pure procrastination and productive deep dives.

Have I left anything out that you’d like to tell other researchers?

Research and writing are lonely tasks. To help overcome the isolation, form a writing group, or create some other kind of research community to share work or chat about progress. It’s crucial. Hardly anyone can keep going without encouragement and companionship. I couldn’t.