Rena Lauer

Rena Lauer is an Associate Professor of History & Religious Studies at Oregon State University, where she teaches in the School of History, Philosophy & Religion. She holds a PhD from Harvard (2014). Her research covers cross-cultural contacts and minority communities in the late medieval eastern Mediterranean, often through law, religion, and gender. She is the author of Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). She was a PRAx humanities research fellow in 2021-2022, working on a study of freed slaves and their use of legal institutions in Venetian Crete and other eastern Mediterranean islands. She also leads the Jewish Women's Wills project, which gathers wills and related documents written for Jewish women before 1600 CE.