By AmandaDecember 5, 2012
In a few days, my advisor will be having her biannual end-of-the-semester party. There will be the usual accouterments of an academic party: cheese, crackers, wine, a sausage wheel, but there will also be two babies. Last year, two of my advisor?s students had children. She?s expecting another one of her students to have a baby this year, and at least one of her previous students also had children in graduate school. Although her students seem to be particularly fecund, she?s not the only the advisor with pregnant graduate students in my department.
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By ChristopherNovember 28, 2012
From William and Mary graduate student and friend of JI Spencer Wells:
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By CristineNovember 3, 2012
On Thursday, October 25, Janet Bennion, Professor of Anthropology at Lyndon State College in Vermont, delivered a lecture, ?The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism,? at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. Professor Bennion is an expert on the contemporary practice of polygamy among Mormon fundamentalists, and the author of several books on the subject. Bennion?s lecture focused on her most recent book, Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism, which she presented as a synthesis of her more than twenty years of research among polygamous groups in North America. Her goal, she said, was to produce a readable work that would educate the general public about these groups, as well as better preparing law enforcement officials to deal with them?and thus to avoid another event like the ill-managed 2008 raid on the FLDS Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas.
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By CristineOctober 22, 2012
We thought that some of the New England branch of the JI community might be interested in this upcoming event at Brandeis University:
?The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism?
A lecture by Janet Bennion, author of Polygamy in Primetime
Thursday, October 25, 2012, 7:00 to 9:00pm
Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Epstein Building, Brandeis University
515 South Street, Waltham MA 02454
Media portrayals of Mormon women have focused on the potential for oppression and abuse within both the mainline church and fundamentalists sects. Drawing on her 17 years of fieldwork among fundamentalist polygamous Mormons, Janet Bennion argues that some “sister wives” find fulfillment and even empowerment through their domestic arrangements. In this lecture, she will be joined by historian Laurel Ulrich to look beyond the official patriarchy and find the subtle feminisms Mormon women embody.
Janet Bennion is a professor of social sciences at Lyndon State College in Vermont. Her latest book, “Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism”, was published in 2012 by the Brandeis Series on Gender, Culture, Religion, and Law, a collaboration between the HBI and the University Press of New England.
Free and open to the public.
Parking in Epstein Lot.
RSVP encouraged: hbi@brandeis.edu
By Andrea R-MOctober 8, 2012
President Thomas S. Monson?s announcement in General Conference on Saturday, October 6, 2012, that young women can now serve missions at age 19 is no less than revolutionary. This move might seem like a pragmatic attempt to boost global missionary efforts. However, a brief historical overview of the last century?s changes for sister missionaries provides some useful context for how remarkable this policy really is.
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By Jenny RSeptember 19, 2012
DUP: Cornelia Harriet Hales Horne Clayton
Your initial reaction may be one of disgust (one naturally thinks of hairballs!) or disdain (how often did they wash their hair anyway?). Intricate designs of human hair, fastidiously fashioned into flowers, trees, and abstract designs, came to represent a Victorian ideal of nostalgia, elaborate texture, and ostentatious ornamentation in the memory of ancient human relics of the Saints.
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By Andrea R-MSeptember 13, 2012
The Mormon Women?s History Initiative
invites you to an evening of insights into the KUED documentary film
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By JJohnsonAugust 29, 2012
Professor Jared Farmer and the State University of New York at Stonybrook very generously posted a free e-book last week?Mormons in the Media, 1832-2012. Though the title should be “Mormons in American Media,” the 342-page book and the hundreds of images therein need to be seen. They are beautiful and brilliant?some impressively horrific in their full technicolor glory. Farmer builds upon a foundation established by Gary Bunker and Davis Bitton in their 1983 The Mormon Graphic Image, 1833-1914: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations and is able to radically enlarge it. The expansive scope of these pages can easily induce a little head spinning?the very best kind.
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By ChristopherAugust 23, 2012
Earlier this week, Max Mueller posted at Peculiar People some thoughtful reflections on non-Latter-day Saint historians of Mormonism and their role as “friendly critics” to Mormons and Mormonism. He used recent op-eds authored by Helen Radkey and John Turner on proxy baptisms and Mormonism’s history of racial exclusion, respectively, to frame his argument. It’s well worth reading and recommended to all JI readers.
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By Tona HAugust 15, 2012
My new calling as ward choir director came with the keys, so to speak, to the closet of old music. I cleaned it out, took it all home, and spread it all over the floor of our library to organize. I didn?t intend for this to be an archival research moment, but as I sorted and tossed I became drawn into the experience and starting reading slower and slower? it was, in a sense, a historical archive dating back at least to the late 1970s.
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Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
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