CFP: Voices of Latter-day Saint Women in the Pacific and Asia (due November 1, 2022)

2023 Church History in the Pacific & Asia Conference
“Voices of Latter-day Saint Women in the Pacific and Asia”
(…formerly the Mormon Pacific Historical Society Conference)
Call for Proposals:

The Department of Religious Education and The Faculty of Culture, Language & Performing Arts
at Brigham Young University-Hawaii announce the 2023 Church History in the Pacific & Asia
Conference. The Conference will be held March 3–4, 2023 on the BYU-Hawaii Campus in Laie,
Hawaii. This year’s conference will specifically consider stories, achievements and voices of
women who have shaped, refined and helped realize the Latter-day Saint experience in the
Pacific and Asia.

We invite scholars and rigorous studiers of Church History to submit proposals specifically
addressing the theme of “Voices of Latter-day Saint Women in the Pacific and Asia.” Proposals
should consist of a brief abstract (no more than 500 words) and a current CV or description of
your experience. Proposals may be sent to eric.marlowe@byuh.edu. Deadline for the
submission of proposals is November 1, 2022. Notification of acceptance will be given by
November 15, 2022. Following the conference, selected papers will be considered for
publication by the Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian & Pacific Studies at BYU-Hawaii.
Please address any questions to Eric Marlowe eric.marlowe[ at] byuh.edu, 808-675-3643.

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Job: Editor for The Journal of Mormon History

The Mormon History Association is conducting a search for the editor of the Journal of Mormon History. The editor of the journal determines the content, solicits submissions, oversees peer review, works with submitting authors in performing substantive and stylistic content editing, and coordinates with a JMH production staff and the University of Illinois Press to ensure that quarterly issues of the journal are published according to deadline and within budget. The editor has full editorial control of the journal but reports to the MHA Board of Directors in maintaining a high-quality product that serves as the flagship publication for the organization. The Mormon History Association is particularly interested in mid-career and senior scholars with experience in the history of the Mormon tradition but will consider submissions by all qualified applicants. 

The person chosen to be the editor will be appointed to a part-time four-year term beginning in December 2022, renewable at the discretion of the MHA Board of Directors. They will serve as co-editor until August 2023, when Jessie L. Embry will complete her term.  

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Book of Mormon Studies Association Conference Program

You can join BOMSA here!

October 6 – 9
USU Conference Center

Thursday (October 6)

Display of Book of Mormon Original Manuscript – 1:30 pm
Panel presentation: “Complexities of Conservation, Imaging, and Piecing together the Fragments of the Original Manuscript of the BoM for the Joseph Smith Papers,” by Emiline Twitchell, Tyler Thorsted, and Robin Jensen
Church History Library, Salt Lake City

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CHURCH HISTORY DEPARTMENT CAREER DAY

Please find a flyer attached to this post if you’re able to share it with others!

Join the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a virtual career day event and explore exciting career opportunities with the Church History Department.

Do you have a passion for Church history? Are you a history student who wants to work in your field? Join us for a virtual career day info session, interact with current employees from the Church History Department, and learn about potential career paths and upcoming internships.

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CFP: Faith and Knowledge Conference (due January 7, 2023)

EIGHTH BIENNIAL FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE CONFERENCE

CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY

CLAREMONT, CA

MAY 19-21, 2023

The Faith and Knowledge Conference was established in 2007 to bring together Mormon graduate students (a member of any Restoration church) in religious studies and related disciplines in order to explore the interactions between religious faith and scholarship. During the past seven conferences, students have shared their experiences in the church and the academy and the new ideas that have emerged as a result. These papers and conversations provided thought-provoking historical, exegetical, and theoretical insights and compelling models of how to reconcile one’s discipleship with scholarly discipline.

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Review: Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism (Minnesota)

K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

I haven’t read a book as historiographically disruptive to Mormon Studies as K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism. Covering 1830 to the present, it covers a much longer period than most monographs on Mormonism. In addition to a longer framing, Mohrman employs queer feminist theory, queer of color critique, critical ethnic studies, and other methodological tools to reveal what Mormonism’s “peculiarity” (or lack thereof) tells about what it means to be American. The book’s rich examination of Mormonism’s place in the United States and also for what Mormonism’s being defined as “peculiar” reveals about the biopolitics of American exceptionalism. In short, Mohrman argues that Mormonism is not exceptional, and in fact, shows what it means to be American across time in U.S. history.

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Review: Caroline Kline, Mormon Women at the Crossroads (Illinois)

This review comes from Makoto Hunter, a graduate student in history at the University of California–Santa Barbara studying American religious life at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and public memory. A former research and editorial assistant for the Intermountain Histories digital history project, she has authored two online public history series, titled “Mapping the Polygamy Underground” and “Confederate Markers in the Intermountain West.”

Reading Caroline Kline’s Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness, published this year by the University of Illinois Press, has been an exercise of discovery, delight, and richly provoking insights. Based primarily on 98 anonymized oral history life interviews conducted with Latter-day Saint women of color (archived at the Claremont Colleges Library), Kline’s interdisciplinary work is part ethnography, part lived religion, and part theology. The book documents the lives of Latter-day Saint women of color, examines their experiences with and perspectives on intersections of religion, gender, race, and class, and argues for understanding their agentive lives through the lens of a shared moral orientation which Kline calls non-oppressive connectedness. Attentive to interviewees’ expressed priorities and values, Kline both shares their stories in their irreducible complexity and highlights key throughlines and contextually specific nuances in what ultimately synthesizes into a lay theology expressed from the margins of the tradition. As such, in addition to gathering personal, textured accounts of what it is like to live as a woman of color in Mormonism, Crossroads also expresses a Mormonism that is interpreted, adapted, and authored by women of color. This book is an indispensable companion for any study of contemporary Mormonism, particularly as expressed in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Crossroads’ denominational focus).

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Job Ad: LDS Church History Museum Director

Church History Museum Director

Salt Lake City, UT, United States

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Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 13

Documents, Volume 13 was edited by Christian K. Heimburger, Jeffrey D. Mahas, Brent M. Rogers, J. Chase Kirkham, Matthew S. McBride, and Mason K. Allred. Visit josephsmithpapers.org for more information.

The Joseph Smith Papers Project recently released the thirteenth volume of their Documents series, which covers the relatively short period of August-December 1843. It comprises ninety-eight documents, transcriptions, contextualization, and footnoting that “chronicle a busy, often tumultuous period of [Joseph Smith’s] life” (xix). Helpfully, they show a religious leader, politician, businessman, and family man managing many concerns while acting primarily in his prophetic ministry. As with other volumes, D13 shows the workings of a man who saw no distance between the sacred and the profane. This collapsing of boundaries was evident, too, in his personal life. Even as he escaped the Missouri courts, he could not escape difficulties in home life or pressure in his religious ministry.

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How and Why to Write a Helpful Book Review

Book reviews are their own genre. They are not like anything else that you’ll write as a scholar. This is true for several reasons, which I’ll outline, but certainly because they are doing a particular kind of work in their analysis. Articles and books are generally self-explanatory for what they do as pieces of academic writing—book reviews’ values are not as easily grasped at first blanche.

In this post, I hope to share a few pointers for how to write a helpful book review. I use “helpful” and not “good” purposefully. Book reviews are utilitarian and meant to be engaged and digested by more people than will read the book. Know the genre and recognize its value.

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