Lau­ra Arnold Leib­man is a Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and Human­i­ties at Reed Col­lege and the win­ner of a Jor­dan Schnitzer Book Award and four Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards. Her work focus­es on reli­gion and the dai­ly lives of women and chil­dren in ear­ly Amer­i­ca and uses every­day objects to help bring their sto­ries back to life. She is the author of Indi­an Con­verts (U Mass Press, 2008) and Mes­sian­ism, Secre­cy and Mys­ti­cism: A New Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ear­ly Amer­i­can Jew­ish Life (Val­len­tine Mitchell, 2012), which won a Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award, a Jor­dan Schnitzer Book Award from the Asso­ci­a­tion for Jew­ish Stud­ies, and was select­ed as one of Choice’s Out­stand­ing Aca­d­e­m­ic Titles for 2013. Known, too, for her schol­ar­ship in Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties, Lau­ra served as the Aca­d­e­m­ic Direc­tor for the award-win­ning mul­ti­me­dia pub­lic tele­vi­sion series Amer­i­can Pas­sages: A Lit­er­ary Sur­vey (2003).