DUE TO COVID-19 SAFETY CONCERNS, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED

ABOUT THIS LECTURE:

ABOUT THIS SPEAKER:

Joy Ladin is the author of eleven books, including 2018’s The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (Brandeis UP), a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and Triangle Award that received a starred review inPublishers Weekly; Through the Door of Life, a memoir of gender transition that was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and winner of a Forward Fives Award; and nine books of poetry, including last year’s The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press) and Fireworks in the Graveyard (Headmistress Press), Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life, and two Lambda Literary Award finalists, Transmigration and Impersonation. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research fellowship.

She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Princeton University, where she was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship as top graduate student in the Humanities, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Since 2003, she has held the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. Her scholarly work has been supported by a Fulbright Scholarship and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship.

Since coming out as transgender in 2008, Joy has become a nationally recognized speaker on transgender issues. She has been featured in many National Public Radio interviews, most notably “On Being with Krista Tippett,” which has been rebroadcast twice, as well as numerous interviews and profiles in numerous publications.

She has given invited talks and readings at many universities and colleges, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, George Washington University, the University of Arizona, the University of Connecticut, the University of San Francisco, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College. 

She has also been a featured speaker outside academia, including delivering keynote talks at the 21^st World Congress of LGBT Jews, and the 2015 Asanbe Diversity Symposium at Austin Peay State University. She has spoken to dozens of Jewish communities around the country, and served as scholar-in-residence at a number of synagogues. She is a member of the Board of Keshet, a national organization devoted to full inclusion of LGBTQ Jews in the Jewish world.