Professor Naomi Seidman has been appointed as Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies effective July 1, 2025, until June 30, 2030.
Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of five books including most recently, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (2016, winner of the Borsch-Rast Prize and Fania Levant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association), Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (2019, Winner of a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies), and Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish (Stanford, 2024). She is the recipient of many major awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), an NEH Senior Scholar Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History (2016–2017), a SSHRC Insight Grant, two SSHRC Connections Grants, and a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant.
Professor Seidman is also involved in many creative and interdisciplinary projects, including constructing a website devoted to the Bais Yaakov transnational school system that serves Orthodox Jewish girls; producing concerts based on Bais Yaakov music from interwar Poland; and working on a documentary film with Pearl Gluck, filmmaker and professor at Pennsylvania State University, devoted to the founder of the school system, Sarah Schenirer. She also wrote a popular podcast on the experience of leaving Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities, Heretic in the House, which won a Signal Award in 2023. Her short story “Raised by Jews” won a fiction prize from Lilith Magazine and her creative nonfiction essay, “Reflections on a Belated Apostasy,” was listed as one of the 100 Best Essays of the Year in Best Essays of 2002.
Her current research project, “Grammars of Migration from the Bible to the Mexican Border,” mobilizes Translation Studies and Diaspora Studies to explore the evolution of language and discourse describing migration and migrants in religious and political discourse.
Please join us in welcoming Professor Seidman to her new role!