By March 16, 2020
As millions of us throughout the world move into voluntary isolation to avoid spreading COVID-19 I thought it would be nice to recommend a few podcast episodes to download to pass the time. Please add your own in the comments!
Seriously, though. Wash your hands. Flatten the curve.
By January 1, 2020
I didn’t know what Mormon Studies was in December 2009. Sure, I had just taken a course on American Christianity at BYU, but it hadn’t caused me to think much about the academic study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or any of the other branches that connect to Joseph Smith’s religious ideas. Now, a decade later, it strikes me that the field has risen considerably in the eyes of the academy and in the estimation of non-academic Latter-day Saints.
I believe the strength of Mormon Studies publications and the venues in which they appear is one of the most important developments of the past ten years. We’ve passed the point where a press will take on a Mormon Studies project just for book sales. Books on Mormonism are now published regularly by university press catalogues, and not just traditional Mormon Studies powerhouses like the University of Illinois Press, the University of Utah Press, or the University of North Carolina Press, but with Harvard University Press, Liveright/Norton, Oxford University Press, University of Nebraska Press, and the University of Chicago Press.
By June 21, 2018
Back by popular demand, the Juvenile Instructor will be hosting its Fourth Annual Summer Book Club in 2018! This year’s book is Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard UP, 2008).[1] The selection of Farmer’s book continues our ongoing emphasis on biography. The first two years, we read and discussed Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling and then Newell and Avery’s Mormon Enigma, biographies of Mormonism’s founding couple. Last year, we read Ulrich’s A House Full of Females, a group biography of several women (and a few men) of the movement’s first generation. On Zion’s Mount is perhaps best understood as the biography of a place—Mount Timpanogos—and how it became such a prominent landmark in Utah.
By June 8, 2018
Congratulations to all of the winners! JI-ers are in bold.
Individual Awards
Arrington: Gary James Bergera
Special Citation: Cherry Bushman Silver
Book Awards
Best Book: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (Knopf, 2017).
Best Biography: Carol Cornwall Madsen, Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History (University of Utah Press, 2017).
Best First Book: Brent M. Rogers, Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
Honorable Mention: Mary Campbell, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Best Documentary Editing: Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds., The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History (Church Historian’s Press, 2016).
Article Awards
Best Article: Amy Harris, “Early Mormonism’s Expansive Families and the Browett Women,” in Rachel Cope et al., eds., Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017): 83-112.
Women’s History: Andrea G. Radke-Moss, “Silent Memories of Missouri: Mormon Women and Men and Sexual Assault in Group Memory and Religious Identity,” in Rachel Cope et al., eds., Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017): 49-81.
International: Lamond Tullis, “Tzotzil-Speaking Mormon Maya in Chiapas, Mexico,” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 2 (2017): 189-217.
Excellence: Jeffrey David Mahas, “‘I Intend to Get Up a Whistling School’: The Nauvoo Whistling and Whittling Movement, American Vigilante Tradition, and Mormon Theocratic Thought,” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 4 (2017): 37-67.
JMH Award: Tonya Reiter, “Black Saviors on Mount Zion: Proxy Baptisms and Latter-day Saints of African Descent,” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 4 (2017): 100-123.
Student Awards
Dissertation: Taunalyn Ford Rutherford, “Conceptualizing Global Religions: An Investigation of Mormonism in India,” Claremont Graduate University.
Thesis: Jessica Nelson, “The ‘Mississippi of the West’: Religion, Conservatism, and Racial Politics in Utah, 1960-1978,” Utah State University.
Graduate Paper: Matt Lund, “Missionary Widows: The Economic and Social Impact of Mormon Missions on Families,” University of Utah.
By May 9, 2018
We are pleased to present a Scholarly Inquiry Q&A with Seth Perry, Assistant Professor of Religion in the Americas at Princeton University and a past guest contributor to the JI. Professor Perry earned his PhD from the University of Chicago (whoop whoop!) in 2013, and he maintains an active research interest in Mormonism, which he discusses both below and in his article “An Outsider Looks In at Mormonism,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, iss. 22 (3 February 2006) [subscription required for full access]. He is also the author of “The Many Bibles of Joseph Smith: Textual, Prophetic, and Scholarly Authority in Early-National Bible Culture,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 3 (September 2016): 750-75. See my overview of that article here. Perry’s first book, imminently forthcoming from Princeton University Press, is Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States.
By March 19, 2018
As Joan Scott said, ?Those who would codify the meaning of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history.? [1] Jonathan Stapley?s important new book, Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology explores the history of priesthood, one of Mormonism?s most fractious and fertile ideas, a word that contains worlds of complex meaning and diversity of lived practice about sacred authority and divine power. His work does so primarily by cleaving elements of Mormon priesthood into two general categories, which have too often become conflated in contemporary Mormon discourse and history: cosmology and ecclesiology [2]. Both deserve closer examination if we are to understand just what makes this book so significant and refreshing.
By December 11, 2017
The Mormon Studies Review is the best annual over view of the Mormon Studies (sub)field available anywhere. Produced by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the journal is produced by a remarkable editorial team. You can subscribe for $10 (and you get the Maxwell Institute’s other publications, too!). I’ll highlight each contribution, and pull a sentence or two from each article to give a taste of the writing and rigor involved in each contribution. As much as the summaries, I hope that you’ll appreciate with me the myriad of approaches that could be used in Mormon History or Mormon Studies. The field, as they say, is white and ready to harvest.
First, a review panel comprised of Ann Little (a renowned women’s history specialist and microhistorian), Paul Reeve (the Simmons Professor of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah), and Sarah Carter (a historian of plural marriage outside of Mormonism) examines Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females.[i] An excerpt from Little’s response sums up the book well:
Ulrich’s instinct to hew to the daily realities of mid-nineteenth-century missionary life and westward imperial expansion serves her well. The Mormons she portrays lead complicated lives, emotionally and sexually messy as well as frequently (literally) clogged with mud, dirt, and dysentery from their various removes and migrations. She focuses on the details of early Mormon life as they were revealed in diaries rather than retrospective memoirs, which brings the immediacy of their experimentation to life.
By December 4, 2017
Once again, this is my attempt to recap the historiography of Mormonism from the past twelve months. This is the eighth such post, and previous installments are found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I do not list every single book and article from 2016, but I do highlight those I found most interesting and relevant. Therefore, a strong bias is obviously involved, so I hope you?ll add more in the comments.
The Instant Classic
Laurel Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women?s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (Knopf).Readers of this blog should already be familiar with Ulrich’s new book. (And hopefully everyone has already read our summer book club devoted to the masterpiece.) If you’re interested in my take, my review is found in Dialogue. In short: it’s perhaps the most significant book in Mormon studies since Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, and perhaps surpasses even that. Make sure to read the roundtable devoted to Ulrich in the most recent issue of Mormon Studies Review; and while you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the field’s best review journal.
By November 17, 2017
Here are the Mormon History and Mormon Studies Panels/Receptions at AAR 2017. If you’re interested in writing a post sharing your experience at AAR, please email joseph dot stuart at utah dot edu.
By September 25, 2017
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, whose book we have been reading together for nearly six months, has graciously agreed to answer a few questions from JI bloggers and readers. If you found the book club useful and/or interesting, we hope you will follow JI on Facebook, Twitter, and share our articles.
JI: What has the reception been among academic, popular, and Mormon audiences?
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