Isaac Barnes May

Isaac Barnes May is a recent graduate of law at Yale University and currently a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and the Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression. In his role at the Abrams Institute, Isaac is working on a project studying the constitutional protections for journalistic freedom under the Press Clause.

He also served as an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia, where he completed a PhD in Religious Studies. He is a graduate of Earlham College and Harvard Divinity School. Isaac specializes in American religious history, focusing on religion and modernity, liberal religion, and the religious left. He is particularly interested in the study of pacifism, religion and law, and how religious groups respond to the pressures of secularization. His dissertation focuses on changing notions of God and the emergence of nontheistic perspectives within twentieth-century Unitarianism, Quakerism, and Reconstructionist Judaism. Isaac was a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism, and his research has been published in journals including Peace & Change and Religions.