Meet the New Deinard Chair in Jewish History, Dr. Noam Sienna
The Department of History and the Center for Jewish Studies are excited to announce that Dr. Noam Sienna will join the University of Minnesota in fall 2026 as the new Amos S. Deinard Chair in Jewish History. Dr. Sienna’s scholarship sits at the intersection of two fields: the history of Jewish communities in the early modern and modern Mediterranean world, and the history of the book as a material object. His first book, Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana, 2025), won the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association. Spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, it examines the work of Jewish writers and printers in the Maghreb, and the books they produced as integral to their community’s negotiation of evolving relationships with their Muslim neighbors and European colonial powers. You can hear a conversation about the book at the History Book Club.
Sienna earlier undertook the compilation of a groundbreaking collection of translated sources for Jewish LGBTQ history, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Philadelphia, 2019), which won both the Anthology Prize of the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. His many articles and book chapters encompass a broad range of topics in early modern Jewish history, from the translation culture of medieval Iberia to Sephardi Jewish cookbooks and foodways.
Dr. Sienna is also a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, and most recently served as the Aresty Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. He co-curated the exhibit “Faith in the Press: Jewish Printers and Printing in the Twin Cities, 1890-1950” on display in the spring 2026 semester at the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota. His current book project, tentatively titled Printed in Ishmael’s Realm: Technology and Theology in the First Ottoman Jewish Press, focuses on the printing house of the Ibn Nahmias family in Istanbul in the turbulent decades after the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Iberia.
Save the Date! Dr. Sienna will be giving an inaugural Deinard lecture on November 16, 2026.
The Deinard Chair in early modern and modern Jewish History was established in 2007 with a major donation from the Kelen Family Foundation and gifts from other community members. It honors Amos S. Deinard, a Minneapolis lawyer and civil rights leader, who was a founder of the Minneapolis Human Rights Commission and chairman of the Minneapolis Fair Employment Practices Commission.
