Jewish culture scholar Naomi Seidman has joined the University of Toronto as the newest Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts.
Seidman joins the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where she was the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture.
Highly regarded as a major and unique voice within the humanities, her scholarship focuses on gender and modern Jewish culture, translation and Jewish-Christian relations, Orthodox Jewish history, and psychoanalysis and Jewish languages. Seidman’s research and teaching interests include translation studies, translating the bible, the sexual transformation of the Ashkenaz, and Haskalah literature.
Earlier this year, Seidman was awarded the Graduate Theological Union’s inaugural Borsch-Rast Book Prizefor The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature, which explores the role played by literature in the modernization of Jewish marriage practices.
She is the author of more than 30 articles and essays and her forthcoming book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition is an in-depth study of a movement that normalized the concept that girls should receive a formal Jewish education
In 2016, Seidman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Senior Scholars, awarded by the Center for Jewish History in New York.