Shira E. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in late antique rabbinic and contemporary Orthodox and ex-Orthodox Judaism. A comparatist by training, her interdisciplinary research integrates textual, phenomenological, and bioethnographic methods to investigate the construction of gender, sex, and sexuality within minoritized ethnoreligious worlds and their educational institutions. Crossing humanities, social sciences, and biomedical sciences, Schwartz examines the role of space in shaping bodies and connects educational and biomedical environments as sites of religious and biomaterial reproduction. Her research interests encompass rabbinic Judaism—particularly rabbinic education and embodiment in late antiquity and contemporary Jewish institutional afterlives—American Judaism, Jewish Orthodoxy and ex-Orthodoxy, comparative ex-religion, feminist science studies, bioethnography, textual ethnography, gender/sex, sexuality, reproduction, and religious education. Current projects include Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Reproduction, Evanjudaism, Religion as Hormone, and Hormonal Ethnography: Hysterical Hormones, Hormonal Havrutas.

Schwartz holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a graduate certificate in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis, and a BA from Yeshiva University. Prior to joining Northwestern in 2023, she served as the inaugural Phyllis Backer Professor of Jewish Studies at Syracuse University, a visiting scholar in Stanford University's Graduate School of Education Concentration for Education and Jewish Studies, and a fellow at the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities. Her work has been supported by the Association for Jewish Studies, Network for Research in Jewish Education, Jewish Orthodoxies Research Fellowship, Humanities Without Walls, and the 2025-2026 Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship. Key publications are “Unorthodox Media” and “The Unorthodox Choice,” both in @theTable by Feminist Studies in Religion, January 2022. She has organized workshops, conference panels, and projects including the “Unorthodox Media” series on Netflix’s My Unorthodox Life, and completed Salivary Bioscience Training at the University of California, Irvine.

Professional Email: shira.schwartz@northwestern.edu