This job is to assist the Church History Department in its purpose to help God’s Children make and keep sacred covenants by researching and writing for Church history publications, sometimes as a project lead. Under limited supervision, this individual acts as a primary contributor to Church history publications, researching, writing, annotating, and editing content regarding Latter-day Saint history. Reports to managing historian or senior managing historian.
Women have always played an essential role in the Church’s development and continuance, and our historical understanding of the extent of that role has continued to evolve. While much of the discourse focuses on the move to Zion and the institutional Church in Utah, women were following Christ’s restored doctrines in Europe and the rest of the world. Come learn from three experts who can share how women’s experiences and roles in the Church differed in European and American contexts, and see how leadership and engagement can be found in every scenario.
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.
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).
It did not take long after I started reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth for me to be completely hooked. Really, it was on page 6 in the Introduction. Barr told the story of what inspired her to write the book—her husband’s dismissal from his job as a youth pastor. Barr, a historian of medieval Christianity, had long recognized issues with the idea of Biblical womanhood as it was taught in her Southern Baptist faith, but she had stayed silent for a myriad of reasons. Finally, she could not stay silent anymore. Barr wrote, “By staying silent, I had become part of the problem. Instead of making a difference, I had become complicit in a system that used the name of Jesus to oppress and harm women.”[1]
For me, those sentences spoke to an internal wrestle I was already having. You see, I had been thinking a lot about Eliza R. Snow. Eliza is, I think, a fascinating case study for the negotiations of patriarchy within nineteenth-century Mormonism.[2] Snow was not what we would consider a feminist. She did not believe in equality between men and women. She upheld the authority of men in the church over women and she taught that wives should submit to their husbands. However, she had a powerful voice within the church and used her voice to help dismantle or counter some patriarchal teachings and encourage women to obtain educations, pursue careers, contribute to the economy, and other things that we might look back on and praise for their feminist underpinnings. Eliza made a real difference in the church. But at what cost? Eliza, it seems, had to uphold the authority and superiority of male power within the church to be given space for her voice to be heard. She was, to some degree, complicit in a system that oppressed women.[3]
I had been wondering if that was still true today. Do women in the LDS Church today still have to support patriarchal systems to have a voice? Is the possibility of having a powerful enough voice to enact real change worth the risk of complicity in an oppressive system? I still do not have answers to those questions. But Barr’s book inspired me to think more critically about ideas surrounding womanhood within Christianity.
Consultation on Latter-day Saint Women in Comparative Perspective 2019–2021
This three-year consultation will bring together a cohort of approximately twelve scholars with interests in gaining an in-depth understanding of the history and contemporary status of Latter-day Saint women in comparative perspective. Participants will gain and share critical tools for research, share drafts of work, and propose further avenues for future analysis.
The Juvenile Instructor is conducting a roundtable this month on Colleen McDannell’s Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy, recently published by Oxford University Press. Follow along here at the blog as contributors explore different themes within McDannell’s book.
The Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team has asked Colleen McDannell to speak and answer questions on her new book, Sister Saints: Mormon Women since the End of Polygamy, on Thursday, November 8. 2018 at the University of Utah. Please mark your calendars and plan to attend!
Bilagáanaa niliigo’ dóó Kinyaa’áanii yásh’chíín. Bilagáanaa dabicheii dóó Tsinaajinii dabinálí. Ákót’éego diné asdzá̹á̹ nilí̹. Farina King is “Bilagáanaa” (EuroAmerican), born for “Kinyaa’áanii” (the Towering House Clan) of the Diné (Navajo). Her maternal grandfather was EuroAmerican, and her paternal grandfather was “Tsinaajinii” (Blackstreaked Woods People Clan) of the Diné. She is Assistant Professor of History and an affiliate of the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Department at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. in History at Arizona State University.
She was the 2016-2017 David J. Weber Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at the Clements Centers for Southwest Studies of Southern Methodist University. She was the 20152016 Charles Eastman Dissertation Fellow at Dartmouth College. She received her M.A. in African History from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. from Brigham Young University with a double major in History and French Studies. Her main area of research is colonial and postcolonial Indigenous Studies, primarily Indigenous experiences of colonial and boarding school education. Her first book was published by the University Press of Kansas, in October 2018, which is titled The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century. In this book, she explores how historical changes in education shaped Diné collective identity and community by examining the interconnections between Navajo students, their people, and Diné Bikéyah (Navajo lands). The study relies on Diné historical frameworks, mappings of the world, and the Four Sacred Directions.
Historian/Writer – Church History Department UNITED STATES | UT-Salt Lake City ID 217340, Type: Regular Full-Time Posting Dates: 09/14/2018 – 10/05/2018 Job Family: Library, Research&Preservation Department: Church History Department
PURPOSES: The Church History Department announces an opening for a historian/writer with an emphasis on women’s history within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Duties will include researching and writing, in collaboration with others, documentary and narrative histories on the experience of Latter-day Saint women.
RESPONSIBILITIES • Conducts appropriate research accurately and within professional standards under the supervision of project management. • Produces publishable volumes and material for websites. Possible duties include historical research, verification of transcriptions of documents against original sources, developing and writing annotations and supplementary material, writing introductions and narrative history, or other tasks as assigned. • Meets deadlines and performs all assigned tasks and according to professional and CHD standards. • May perform duties on multiple projects simultaneously. • Manages and supervises task specific research questions. • Occasionally consults with project team on project management questions. • Contributes to a collegial and professional atmosphere that incorporates the highest standards of behavior and cooperation, promoting teamwork and group purposes.
QUALIFICATIONS: Masters or PhD (or doctoral candidate) in history, religious studies, or related discipline, with demonstrated competence in women’s history. Excellent writing skills and the ability to work in an academic environment that requires personal initiative and collaborative competence. Some experience with creative non-fiction or fiction writing.Professional and personal integrity required to maintain the trust and confidence of professional colleagues, department leadership, and archivists working in other public and private repositories.
WORTHINESS QUALIFICATION: Must be a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and currently temple worthy.
POSTING NOTICE/MORE INFO.Please Note: All positions are subject to close without notice. Find out more about the many benefits of Church Employment at http://careers.lds.org.
Matt Witten on LATTER-DAY SAINT THEOLOGY &: “This one? https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/157453”
Eric Nielson on LATTER-DAY SAINT THEOLOGY &: “I would like to read Paulsen's dissertation. Does anyone have some link or way to access it?”
Blake on LATTER-DAY SAINT THEOLOGY &: “I got a kick out of your list of "finitists" -- for a number of reasons. Sterling McMurrin was certainly not a finitist -- or…”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 3:: “Thanks, Mark. Glad to have been on this journey with you for so many years!”
Mark Ashurst-McGee on Study and Faith, 3:: “I just love this: "historians should be more like detectives and jurors than lawyers"”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 2:: “I'm sad to say that "Everything Everywhere" is the only movie I've ever walked out of (long story of a combination of tending to fall…”
Recent Comments
Matt Witten on LATTER-DAY SAINT THEOLOGY &: “This one? https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/157453”
Eric Nielson on LATTER-DAY SAINT THEOLOGY &: “I would like to read Paulsen's dissertation. Does anyone have some link or way to access it?”
Blake on LATTER-DAY SAINT THEOLOGY &: “I got a kick out of your list of "finitists" -- for a number of reasons. Sterling McMurrin was certainly not a finitist -- or…”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 3:: “Thanks, Mark. Glad to have been on this journey with you for so many years!”
Mark Ashurst-McGee on Study and Faith, 3:: “I just love this: "historians should be more like detectives and jurors than lawyers"”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 2:: “I'm sad to say that "Everything Everywhere" is the only movie I've ever walked out of (long story of a combination of tending to fall…”