The Mormon Body Project: Thoughts Toward a History of Mormon Girls

Cross-posted at Scholaristas.

I never knew I had fat calves until I tried on a pair of skinny jeans.  I tugged on the jeans ? trying to get them over the bulges of my legs.  When I finally did, it was to no avail.  Pants that were big enough to fit over my calves were way too big in the waist.  I had never realized that I had fat calves before ? it had never been an issue because the skirts and jeans that I had worn had never fit them closely or required them to be a certain size.  I soon discovered that the boots also in fashion were equally difficult to fit to my body.  Since then, I have been slightly uncomfortable with my fat calves and chubby knees.  Unfortunately, these areas of the body have proven to be especially unyielding to exercise.

In her book The Body Project, Joan Jacobs Brumberg argues that experiences like mine are not abnormal.  Women?s understandings of their bodies are influenced by pop culture, trends in fashion, and the cosmetics industry.  In the mid-twentieth century, fashion trends that required girls to bare their mid-riffs led girls to be more concerned about the firmness of their stomachs and bodies.[1]  A corset can?t hold your stomach in when you were required to bare flesh.  Brumberg?s project is to explore how the ideas that girls have had about their bodies have changed from the late nineteenth century to the present.

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BYU Church History Symposium, Joseph F. Smith, March 2-3, 2012

Our own Brett D. and other friends of the JI will be participating. See the full schedule: 

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New Guest Blogger: Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Please join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, PhD student doing some fascinating research who blogs at Scholaristas. Here’s a short biographical intro:

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan, where she studies the American West, Comparative Colonialism, and British History.  She is also a graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned a Masters degree in education while teaching elementary school, and the College of Idaho.  Her current project juxtaposes Mormon missionary work in Britain with that in the Pacific to understand the dynamics of race, gender, and class in these two respective fields of labor.  She is also interested in the development of Mormon feminism in the nineteenth century and its connections to the Mormon missionary project.  Finally, Amanda is a connoisseur of Mormon kitsch and collects Mormon missionary action figures, Book of Mormon board games, and Mormon children?s books.

Welcome, Amanda! We look forward to your contributions!

Mormon History Database Survey

For those of you, like myself, who have used and benefitted from the wonderful Mormon History Database—a regularly updated online bibliography of all articles, books, theses, and dissertations in the field—maintained by Mike Hunter at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, please consider taking 5 minutes to participate in the following survey:

https://byu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eDQUjvbRILWwkmg

Many thanks!

Mormon History Association Awards Nominations: Deadline Feb. 15

From the Mormon History Association:

The Mormon History Association will give its yearly awards for the best books, articles, dissertation, thesis, and student papers published or writte on Mormon history during 2011 at its annual 2012 conference, which will be held in June in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The submission deadline is February 15, 2012. Books should be submitted in hard copy in the number specifically requested by chairs. If there is a hardship because the list price of a book is $75 or more, we ask the publisher for one hard copy and an electronic version of the book. Electronic submissions must be sent in WordPerfect, Word, or as a .pdf document. Any member of the Mormon History Association may submit or nominate a publication for consideration. Send specific questions to the subcommittee chairs.

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Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Course Overview

This post is basically an overview of the course itself. In general, there will be four units, each corresponding to a particular textbook that we will read.

But before we get into the units themselves, I will have my students read Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction, by Richard Bushman. Oxford puts out these ?very short introductions? on a variety of topics, and I thought having my students read this one would be a good way to start and get a general overall feel for Mormon history and theology before we really start to dig in.

Joseph Smith

The first major unit will cover the life of the Prophet Joseph Smith. You really cannot do Mormonism without focusing on him a lot. In many ways, that would be like attempting a class on Islam without talking about the Prophet Muhammed. It?s just a bad idea. We will be reading selections from Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman?s marvelous biography of the prophet. Bushman is able to thread the needle between faith and scholarship, coming to no hard conclusions about the faith-content of Joseph?s experiences (even though Bushman himself is a believer) but doing a fabulous job of presenting Joseph the historical figure.

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Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 4: The Syllabus

Here’s the premise of this post: a syllabus should be more than a boring, text-laden legal contract. If you let it, it can also be 1) a thing of beauty, and 2) a tool to think with about your teaching and your students’ learning.

At this point I hope you can see why this post comes late in my series about course and syllabus design (you can read part 1, part 2 and part 3 plus a part 3a if you care about the nitty-gritty of governance and assessment). Actually putting the stuff into a document necessitates having stuff to put, and all the course planning should happen long before you decide what font to use and what color paper to print it on.

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Mormons and Politics at Columbia

On the fifteenth floor in a Columbia University building overlooking a majestic New York City skyline, some of the most well known scholars of Mormonism (–and me–) gathered to present papers on the role of Mormonism and American politics during this so-called ?Mormon Moment.? Professors and students from Columbia and other NYC-area universities, a handful of LDS missionaries (including a JIer?s parents!) and reps from local and international news outlets, braved unreliable elevators to bring the large lecture hall to capacity on both days of the conference.

According to co-organizer, Jana Riess, Columbia?s Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life had hoped to hold such an event for years. And with Romney?s train to the nomination in Tampa back on track?CNN just flashed that Romney won the Nevada Caucuses by twenty-three points?timing could not have been better. Dr. Riess, her co-organizer and former doctoral advisor, Randall Balmer, as well as the Institute?s staff, deserve heaps of praise for a smoothly run and stimulating event, the fruits of which will most certainly be enjoyed throughout this election season and beyond.

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Foxes and Hedgehogs in Mormon Historiography

Isaiah Berlin, one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, once wrote that there were two types of historians: the hedgehog and the fox. Taking the phrase from a throw-away statement of Greek poet Archilochus—“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—Berlin creatively expanded the sentiment to explore two different approaches to the historical craft. On the one hand, foxes were those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle.” Hedgehogs, on the other, were those “who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel–a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” Berlin then attempted to organize all great historians, writers, and philosophers into these two camps: Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzche, Ibsen, and Proust are examples of hedgehogs, while Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, and Goethe are foxes.”[1] You get the picture.

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