Laura Yares

Laura Yares is interested in the different ways that people learn about religion, and the different ways that ideas about religion are created and circulated within educational settings. Her research focuses on history, culture, and education in North America, particularly in Jewish contexts.

Her first book Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America (NYU Press, 2023) was a finalist for a 2023 National Jewish Book Award, and a finalist for a 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award. It shows that education was a central means through which nineteenth century American Jews sought to reimagine Judaism in the modern, Protestant inflected terms of religion. Jewish Sunday Schools focuses closely on issues of women and gender, and on the role of women’s volunteerism in sustaining religious life during the nineteenth century. It also plays close attention to material culture, and to the ways that consumer markets shaped the development of Jewish education.

Her second book engages these interests in popular and consumer culture through a different methodological lens. Judaism Mediated: Learning About Jewishness through the Cultural Arts (co-authored with Sharon Avni, CUNY) is in production with NYU Press, with publication scheduled for August 2026. It utilizes contemporary ethnographic methods to document the different ways that Jews and non-Jews learn about Judaism and Jewishness in the context of leisure time engagements with cultural artistic sites, including museums, television, music, theater, and web-based performances.

She is currently working on two new book projects. Outside In: Converts to Judaism and the Shifting Boundaries of American Jewish Belonging is a history of conversion to Judaism in North America. It charts historical moments of ambivalence towards conversion and converts, arguing that they illuminate broader ideological and communal tensions in American 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.

She regularly teaches courses on the history of Judaism, Judaism in North America, Theories and Methods in Religious Studies, and Introduction to Word Religions. Other courses include offerings for the Religious Studies department’s Religion and Non-Profits undergraduate, M.A. and certificate programs. She has offered independent studies and special topics courses for students in religion, history, and education, and enjoys working with students who are interested in researching religion in North America, Jewish history, nineteenth-century American history, topics related to religion and education, and religion and nonprofits.  With Mary Juzwik (College of Education), and Deborah Margolis (MSU Libraries), she leads a year-long professional development program for Michigan 8-10th grade English Language Arts and Social Studies teachers who teach courses and texts related to the Holocaust and other genocides. See http://hgcf.commons.msu.edu/ for details.

​Laura Yares is a proud first generation college student, and is always happy to meet other first-gen college students at MSU.

PRINCIPAL SCHOLARLY INTERESTS: Jewish education; American Judaism; religion in North America; religion and non-profits; religion and gender; religion and museums.