Faculty and Staff

Faculty & Staff

Andrea S. Allen

Andrea S. Allen is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research has addressed matters of race, sexuality, gender, violence, and religion in Brazil and the African Diaspora. Through a focus on LGBTQ Brazilians, especially Afro-Brazilian lesbian women, her work explores the effects of marginalization from an embodied perspective.

Antonela Arhin

Dr. Antonela Arhin is the Associate Director and a Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto where she teaches courses on human trafficking, diaspora and transnationalism. She brings over 20 years of experience in higher education, government, NGOs and consulting.

Kevin Lewis O’Neill

Professor O’Neill is a cultural and social anthropologist who examines the moral dimensions of contemporary political practice in the Americas. Tenured at the Department for the Study of Religion, Professor O’Neill was appointed the Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies in 2016.

Kenneth McDonald

Professor O’Neill is a cultural and social anthropologist who examines the moral dimensions of contemporary political practice in the Americas. Tenured at the Department for the Study of Religion, Professor O’Neill was appointed the Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies in 2016.

Ted Sammons

Ted Sammons is Assistant Professor (CLTA) in the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on everyday intersections of racial formation, national sovereignty, and capitalist globalization, with particular attention to perspectives on related topics that resonate in the contemporary Caribbean.

Padraic X. Scanlan

Padraic X. Scanlan is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies and the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He is an historian of slavery, emancipation and economic life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Naomi Seidman

Professor Seidman is the University of Toronto, with a split appointment between the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and was previously the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Seidman is presently working on a study of the founding of Bais Yaakov in interwar Poland.

Anna Shternshis

Anna Shternshis is an Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Shternshis is the author of two books, as well as over 20 articles and book chapters. She is the co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs. In 2019, her work with Psoy Korolenko was nominated and shortlisted for a Grammy Award in the world music category.