Job: Research Assistant, Joseph Smith Papers

Research Assistant, Joseph Smith Papers (Church History Department) (Contract Worker)

UNITED STATES |  UT-Salt Lake City

ID 186732, Type: Full-Time – Temporary
POSTING INFO

Posting Dates: 06/23/2017 – 07/21/2017

Job Family: Administrative

Department: Church History Department

PURPOSES

The Church History Department announces an opening for a Research Assistant with the Joseph Smith Papers project. The successful candidate will assist the Joseph Smith Papers in the Publications Division of the Church History Department with historical and textual research for volumes in the Papers? Documents series.  This is an exciting and unique opportunity for someone interested in pursuing a career in history.  We are looking for a motivated, energetic, and skilled individual to join our team! 

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Addendum to the 2018 MHA Call for Papers

This addendum has been added to the 2018 MHA Call for Papers (original call here). Paper abstracts are still due on November 15, 2017 and the conference will still be held on June 7-10, 2018 at Boise, ID.

Since its founding in 1965, the Mormon History Association has been dedicated to the promotion of intellectually rigorous, diverse scholarship on the history of the Mormon tradition. To help us create a welcoming space that embraces work from a wide variety of methodological and religious viewpoints, we encourage individuals to organize panels for the 2018 Conference in Boise, Idaho, that include presenters from a variety of institutional, social, and religious backgrounds. The program committee will give preference to panels that reflect the diversity of the historical profession by featuring women and underrepresented minorities. [Bold added by J Stuart]

Job Ad: Research Assistant in the Church History Department

Research Assistant (Contract Worker) (Church History Department)

UNITED STATES |  UT-Salt Lake City

ID 186050, Type: Full-Time – Temporary

POSTING INFO

Posting Dates: 06/08/2017 – 06/22/2017

Job Family: Administrative

Department: Church History Department
PURPOSES

This Research Assistant position will support the work of several web content projects, with oversight from the Manager and other senior writers, as well, assist in some writing projects being overseen and led by the Division?s Director.

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#MHA2017 Winners

We would like to congratulate the recipients of the 2017 MHA awards! Please find them below:

Leonard Arrington Award:

Jill Mulvay Derr

Best Book: 

Simpson, Thomas W. American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867-1940. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Best Biography: 

Prince,  Stephen L. Hosea Stout: Lawman, Legislator, Mormon Defender. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016.

Best Book International Mormonism: 

Takagi,  Shinji. The Trek East: Mormonism Meets Japan, 1901-1968. Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2016.

Best Memoir / Personal History: 

Bate, Kerry William. The Women: A Family Story. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016.

Best Article:

Hendrix-Komoto, Amanda. “Mahana, You Naked! Modesty, Sexuality, and Race in the Mormon Pacific.” In Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, edited by Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner, 173-97. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Article of Excellence: 

Turley Jr. Richard E. and Jeffrey G. Cannon. “A Faithful Band: Moses Mahlangu and the First Soweto Saints.” BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2016): 9-38.

Best International Article: 

Rutherford, Taunalyn. “The Internationalization of Mormonism: Indications from India.” In Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945, edited by Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner, 37-62. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Best Women’s History Article

Newell, Quincy. “What Jane James Saw.” In Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Patrick Q. Mason, 135-51. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016.

Graduate Student Awards:

Best unpublished graduate student paper

Kitterman, Katherine. “No Ordinary Feelings’: Mormon Women’s Petitions, 1870-1886.”

Best thesis

Brumbaugh Jr., John Howard. “We are Entitled to, and We Must Have, Medical Care’: San Juan County’s Farm Security Administration Medical Plan, 1938-1946.”

Best dissertation

Smith, Christopher C. “Mormon Conquest: Whites and Natives in the Intermountain West, 1847-1851.”

JIers at MHA

Later this week bloggers associated with the Juvenile Instructor will assemble at the Mormon History Association annual conference in St. Charles, Missouri (just outside of St. Louis), a yearly highlight for us. Many of us will be participating in the program as presenters, commentators, and chairs. This post summarizes our contributions.

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JI Summer Book Club: Update

This summer, Juvenile Instructor is hosting a series on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s new and long-awaited book A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism. (The first two posts of the series can be found here and here.)

Many of you will have already learned the devastating news that the Ulrichs’ son Nathan, died in a plane crash in the Bahamas earlier this week, along with his girlfriend and her two sons. Out of respect for this immense loss, we will be pausing our discussion of Laurel’s book, to be resumed at a later date. Please keep an eye on our Facebook page for more information on this hiatus.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the family, their friends, and loved ones at this time.

REMINDER: 2018 Church History Symposium CfP

From the Program Committee: We are just one week away from the submission deadline for the 2018 Church History Symposium! 

2018 Church History Symposium

Business, Wealth, Enterprise, and Debt: The Economic Side of Mormon History, 1830-1930*

March 1-2, 2018

In 1958, Leonard J. Arrington published Great Basin Kingdom, a seminal study in Mormon economic history. Arrington followed this work with several other studies pertaining to the economic history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and of the state of Utah. Other scholars have examined in detail financial operations of the church in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, including explorations of the law of consecration (first revealed to Joseph Smith in 1831) and its implementation, enterprises such as the United Firm and the Kirtland Safety Society, and the economic impact of creating new communities throughout the Great Basin. Picking up where Arrington and others left off, there are new and exciting developments in the study of gender, society, race, and the environment that can enlighten the financial aspects of Mormon history.

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Amici Curiae Brief by Scholars of Mormonism Opposed to Trump’s Refugee and Immigrant Ban

If you haven’t heard already, yesterday a host of 19 scholars submitted an Amici Curiae Brief (amici curiae=friends of the court, or impartial expert advisors) in response to President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13,780, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” Trump’s Executive Order received a cascade of pushback and resistance, mainly criticizing that the order seems to target Muslims (just search the executive order in google news for a host of coverage). The Amici Curiae Brief picks up on this vein and presents the Mormon past with federal immigration policy as an example of how targeting religious minorities through immigration legislation can go horribly wrong.

The Brief tells the history of early Mormon persecution, and late nineteenth-century legal battles over polygamy to show that the government treated Mormons as “outsiders, not full members of the political community.” The argument and section titles are enough to give a sense of the Brief in its entirety:

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BCC Press: A Q&A for Academic Historians

We are pleased to feature this Q&A with Steve Evans, co-founder and a co-editor at the BCC Press. Steve was gracious enough to answer a few questions for scholars for JI. You can submit a manuscript or direct further questions to the press here.You can read more about the BCC Press here and here. 

1. How would peer review work for authors at the BCC Press? Historians and academics are naturally concerned about issues of tenure, CV-building, etc.

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The Third Annual JI Summer Book Club: A House Full of Females

At a recent gathering in Cambridge, MA, Richard Bushman introduced Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to her hometown crowd as Mormonism’s most “distinguished and decorated scholar.” Her Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and many other awards speak to her mastery of the historian’s craft in the broader academy. She is not only Mormonism’s most distinguished and decorated scholars, she is one of the most distinguished and decorated scholars alive today. Ulrich’s research and writing abilities made A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 a natural choice for JI’s Third Annual Summer Book Club. Hundreds of readers have followed along with our book club in the past few years. We hope to read with even more of you this summer!

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