Laura Yares

Laura Yares is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, Her research explores different ways that people learn about religion, and the different ways that ideas about religion are created and circulated within educational setting, particularly in Jewish contexts.

She is the author of Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America, (North American Religions, NYU Press, 2026), a historical analysis of the development of Jewish Sunday schools in the United States. With Sharon Avni (CUNY), she is also the author of Judaism Mediated: Learning About Religion Through the Cultural Arts (NYU Press, 2026), an ethnographic exploration of audience learning about Judaism and Jewishness from popular cultural contexts.

She is currently working on two new book projects. Outside In: Converts to Judaism and the Shifting Boundaries of Jewish Belonging is a history of conversion to Judaism in the 20th century. It charts historical moments of ambivalence towards conversion and converts, arguing that they illuminate broader ideological and communal tensions in Jewish life. A second book project, The Objects of Religious Studies: Histories of Acquisition, is an object-centered study of religious collections held in academic institutions. It explores the acquisition histories of religious objects, images, and manuscripts, arguing that acquisition has been inflected by changing ideas about religion as an object of scholarly study.