Her research focuses on German Jewish cultural and intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with a particular interest in intersections of aesthetics, Bible translation, politics and theology. She has published articles and books on eighteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment, especially Moses Mendelssohn and his reception in contemporaneous scholarship, poetry, and the arts, as well as on the role of translation and aesthetics in German Jewish thought and the place of Psalms in Jewish modernity. She is currently researching the aesthetics of biblical poetry in Jewish thought and culture, especially in nineteenth century Germany among scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Yael Sela has published peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in English and in German. She is the author of two books: Book of the Songs of Israel: Three Introductions to Psalms on Poetry, Translation, and Music by Joel Bril (Berlin 1791), an annotated bilingual edition (Boston and Leiden, 2024); and The People of the Song: Biblical Poetry, Translation, and the Reception of Moses Mendelssohn in the Berlin Haskalah (Boston and Leiden, 2025), a monograph on the role of Psalms and translation in the emergence of Jewish national consciousness.