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Gerda Seligson’s father (1884-1974) was an eminent neo-Hegelian philosopher who founded the journal Logos in 1910 and edited it until 1938. His most famous work is Von Kant bis Hegel (1921-4). Of Jewish extraction, he had become a Christian who held positions at Freiburg (1919-24), Dresden (1924-8) and Kiel (1929-34).Her mother’s family were wealthy textile manufacturers who could support the studies and the years in which anti-Semitism kept Richard from positions he was well qualified for.

Gerda Kroner received a superb education starting as the only girl in her gymnasium class, where she was so advanced that she was employed as a tutor at the age of nine. After graduation she attended university at Heidelberg and then at Kiel, where she studied under Eduard Fraenkel (1886-1970) and Felix Jacoby (1876-1959). There she was also introduced to Judaism and fell in love with it: "When I met Judaism, I had no doubt that that was what I would live with. Strange, eh?"

When Fraenkel moved to Göttingen, she followed him there; after just one semester, however, unhappy with the university, she moved to Berlin, where she, along with fellow student Viktor Pöschl (1910-97), studied under Werner Jaeger (1888-1961). Jaeger saw her through her state exams, which she passed within a day or so of the Reichstag burning (27 February 1933). During these years she met her future husband, who was studying classics at Berlin and Judaica at the Jewish Theological  Seminary.   

Her father was dismissed from his position at Kiel under the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums). In that month he took his daughter Gerda to a Hegel conference in Rome, after which he returned to Breslau alone while she stayed on in Rome, eventually becoming the governess for the archaeologist Ludwig Curtius (1874-1954), the director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. She returned to Berlin in Fall 1934 and married in the spring of the next year.

Her father and mother emigrated to England in 1938 immediately after Kristallnacht, and reached America in the fall of 1939, shortly after World War II began. He became a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York where he was a colleague of both Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). Seligson's husband Rudolf, who was serving as Rabbi of Bonn, emigrated to England in January 1939 and joined the British Army. He brought with him to England a number of Jewish children from the Yavne school in Cologne, saving them from death at the hands of the Nazis. Seligson followed a month later, after packing up the family's precious items, which included the Torah roll and memoir book from the synagogue in Bonn.

During the Blitz, while her husband was stationed at a camp in Shropshire, Seligson worked on a farm picking potatoes and doing other chores with such enjoyment that she actually considered becoming a farmer and laying aside her dreams of teaching, but her experience as a nine-year-old tutor had confirmed in her the desire to be a teacher, as she put it, "from day one."

Seligson gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, on 1 September 1942; just seven months later, Rudolf died from a sudden case of meningitis. With her husband dead and her parents in America, she turned to teaching as a means of support. She taught Latin at the Frimley & Cramberley County School, which was within commuting distance of her home in the London suburb of Richmond, and studied at Birkbeck College, receiving her B.A. in 1945.  

In 1947 the wife of Reinhold Niebuhr mentioned that the prestigious Brearley School for Girls in New York needed a Latin teacher, and Kroner suggested his daughter. The daughter of the newly installed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Lewis Williams Douglas (1894-1974), was at Brearley. Within two weeks he had arranged a visa, and Seligson was on her way to New York. She taught successfully at Brearley but disliked living in a big city. While attending a meeting of Independent School teachers in 1950, she heard a talk by Waldo Sweet (1912-92) and found what he had to say about structural linguistics fascinating. He invited her to collaborate with him to create new Latin instructional materials during two summer workshops (1952, 1953) in Ann Arbor, funded by a Carnegie grant. In 1953 he began teaching at the University of Michigan, and a year later she too was asked to join the faculty there. Because it was already mid-summer, however, Brearley’s administration persuaded her to decline the invitation. The next spring, when she received an invitation to teach Latin at the Tower Hill School (“a DuPont school”) in Wilmington, DE, she did not hesitate to say yes. The year she spent there was a happy one, during which she drafted her first Latin textbook and had her first taste of summer theater, performing in the chorus of the Mikado—an experience that led her, in later years, to direct a dozen student productions of Plautus plays (in Latin/English) and two student productions of Menander plays (in Greek/English), delighting audiences at three different universities.     

In 1956 she accepted an offer from the University of Michigan to teach Latin part-time at its experimental University High School in Ann Arbor and the rest of the time at the university itself, working together with Sweet. When the school closed in 1968, she became a full-time faculty member at the university. Following World War II (and later the Korean Conflict), the GI Bill had allowed far more veterans to go to college than previously; many had never studied a language other than their own. In 1956, when the University of Michigan instituted a language requirement, there was a real shortage of introductory-level textbooks aimed at college students. Sweet’s Latin: A Structural Approach, published in 1957, helped fill that lacuna. The Classics faculty at Michigan, who were used to teaching advanced courses and seminars, welcomed the hiring of Sweet and Seligson, whose pedagogical expertise and interest in linguistics ideally qualified them to lead the department’s elementary Latin program. Seligson contributed to the revised version of Sweet’s Latin, which was used at the university until 1981. By then, however, she had developed her own ideas about how best to construct a Latin textbook and had joined forces with colleagues Glenn Knudsvig (1940-98) and Ruth Swan Craig to co-author Latin for Reading, which became the successor to Sweet’s Latin at Michigan. After her retirement, while in residence at Lawrence University and then at the University of Iowa, she returned to her love of Greek, collaborating with former students Susan Shelmerdine and Ariel Loftus on Greek for Reading, yet another innovative textbook modeled on the design of Latin for Reading. 

According to her friend and student Jim White, Seligson as a teacher was "relentlessly demanding, never dropping her standards for a moment but at the same time deeply sympathetic to the situation of the students, plainly on their side." Another former student, Judy Deuling, reported how life-changing it was to learn from "Mrs. S," and to perform ancient plays under her direction: "Gerda Seligson never gave up on a student: she was determined to give every person entrusted to her care every possible chance to succeed." The Seligson Players' production of Menander's Samia at the University of Michigan in 1977 was the first staging of that lost Greek comedy since its rediscovery and publication in Papyrus Bodmer XXV (Kasser-Austin 1969).

Although Seligson was much admired for her teaching, her Latin and Greek introductory language textbooks, and her articles about linguistics, pedagogy, and performance, she is also famous for having translated her fellow-student Viktor Pöschl’s Die Dichtkunst Virgils: Bild und Symbol in der Äneis (1950) at his request, making that influential work more widely accessible.  She herself found it "kind of funny" that "many people in America don't know me as a language teacher as much as a translator of that particular book."  

Seligson had a distinguished record of leadership in the Jewish community. She was the first woman ever to serve as the president of an American conservative congregation (Beth Israel in Ann Arbor). At her memorial service, her daughter Liz summed up her mother this way: "Although her heritage was Jewish, she was brought up in an assimilated family. As a young adult, she 'rediscovered' Judaism and held on tightly to its traditions....She never thought of herself as a generator of new ideas but rather as a facilitator to translate others' ideas into action."