Mormon Studies Roundup August 2015 (New! Improved! Monthly!)

By August 2, 2015

At a recent meeting of the JI permabloggers which coincided with the MHA meeting in early June, we decided to move our Mormon Studies roundup from weekly to monthly. training.RedCalendarThe feature will now appear on the first Sunday of the month. However, the roundup then promptly took a holiday in July, so apologies for the unintentionally long stretch from the last MS roundup to this one. After such a fast, we are back with a veritable feast of Mormon history-related news and events.

Conference proceedings of the recent Mormons and Catholics conference, held in April at Utah Valley University, have now been posted to Youtube.

Also in the last few weeks, Lindsay Hansen-Park concluded her “Year of Polygamy” series over at fMh with a 100th episode podcast which features historians Claudia Bushman, D. Michael Quinn, and MHA President Laurie Maffly-Kipp.

Oxford University Press highlights their just-released volume The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas Kane with an interview on their blog with the co-editors, Matthew Grow and Ronald Walker.

InterVarsity Press published Talking Doctrine: Mormons and Evangelicals in Conversation, edited by Richard J. Mouw and Robert L. Millet, the fruit of some 15 years of ongoing conversation between a group of about 20 Mormon and evangelical academics.

In digital Mormon history news, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly profiled the Church’s Gospel Topics series (which, incidentally, just added a more prominent page to lds.org aggregating all the new content), describing them–(oddly? incorrectly?)–as an outreach ministry specifically to “former Mormons.” The Joseph Smith Papers Project online has inaugurated new content: the Legal, Business and Financial Records, including the first materials from some two hundred court cases and a wide range of account books, ledgers, and property transactions. And in collaboration with UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Humanities, religious studies professor Kathleen Flake is building a digital database of early Mormon marriage to understand Nauvoo era polygamy. News here and here, and or check out the database under construction.

Although we’re at the height of summer, the fall lecture and conference season will be upon us soon, so mark your calendars for these events.

Robin Jensen of the Joseph Smith Papers Project will lecture at BYU Tuesday, September 18, 2015, on “‘These Were Days Never to be Forgotten’: The Witnesses to the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon.”

The Mormon Social Science Association will sponsor their 21st annual Arrington lecture on September 24, 2015 at the LDS Tabernacle in Logan, featuring Quincy D. Newell, “Narrating Jane: Telling the Story of an Early African American Mormon Woman.”

The Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah announces a multidisciplinary conference, “Black, White, and Mormon” on the evolving status of black people in Mormonism. It will be held October 8-9, 2015 in Salt Lake City.

Some upcoming deadlines and CFPs to keep in mind:

September 1, 2015: deadline for applications for the opening of Journal of Mormon History editor. Click here for job description and details (scroll down for editor).

September 1, 2015: submission deadline for papers for the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology at BYU (October 8-10, 2015). Theme: “Doers of the Word: Belief and Practice.”

September 18, 2015: CFP for an international conference at Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library, “The Uses of Religion in 19th Century Studies” (March 16-19, 2016).

October 1, 2015: CFP for the 2016 Mormon History Assocation meeting in Snowbird, Utah. Conference theme: one, evocative word = “Practice.” Email proposals to the program co-chairs, Melissa Inouye and Benjamin Park, at mhaconference2016 AT gmail DOT com.

Lastly, file this under “they get younger every year.” Maybe this is the inevitable next step following the massive digitization of archives onto the open web, giving anyone access to what was previously only available to scholars at or above graduate school level, but I’ve seen a couple of articles lately about precocious high school students getting published for their own primary source research. In that vein, we’ll take note of Jeffrey Cimmino of Rhode Island, the Georgetown University-bound valedictorian of Mt. St. Charles Academy, who published “A Tragedy of Idealism: Joseph Smith and the ‘City on a Hill'” in the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. Impressive!

Article filed under Roundup


Comments

  1. Wow! So much here. Thanks for keeping this going.

    Comment by Hunter — August 2, 2015 @ 2:30 pm

  2. Thanks, Tona. Very helpful.

    Comment by Gary Bergera — August 2, 2015 @ 4:31 pm

  3. Was someone sidetracked last fast Sunday?

    Comment by sterflu — September 9, 2015 @ 7:59 am


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