Graduate Research Fellowship in Mormon Studies

2022-2023 | Benjamin Spackman
Department of Religion, Clarmemont Graduate University

Ben’s project is titled "The Intellectual Roots of Latter-day Saint Creation/Evolution Conflict in the Twentieth Century: Expertise, Exegesis, and Ecclesiology.” He provides a historical analysis of the conflict between LDS proponents of creationism and evolution, as a case study in religious knowledge production, epistemological conflict, and competition for sociocultural authority. That is, throughout the twentieth century, different LDS scientists, scholars, Church leaders, and lay writers competed to claim the authority of “scripture” and “science” for their starkly contrasting positions on the possibility of biological evolution. Those positions arose from differing constructions of “expertise,” “science,” “scripture,” and “interpretation.” The end result of the study is a surprising understanding of how a Church with a pro-education, pro-science wary openness to evolution in the first half of the twentieth century could transition to a quasi-fundamentalist anti-evolution position in the latter half.

2021-2022 | Janan Graham-Russell
Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University

Janan’s research project, “Churched Bodies: Embodied Practice and the Maintenance of Mormon Identity Among Haitian Latter-day Saints in the United States” is a historical-ethnographic analysis of the role of the physical body, alongside liturgical and daily devotional practices, in the incorporation of immigrants and the construction of Mormon identity in the Mormon Church. She explores the process of incorporation among Haitian Latter-day Saints in the US, examining how non-white immigrant populations may integrate into both the Mormon Church and the United States, and how these processes intertwine. Further, she asks how narratives of race and gender in Mormonism and in the US contextualize the integration of Haitian members as well as interpretations of “belonging” among Haitian and non-Haitian members.

2020-2021 | Hannah Jung
Department of History, Brandeis University

Hannah’s research project investigates secrecy as a cultural phenomenon that shaped the lives of Mormon polygamous families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foregrounding the experiences of families, she examines their practices of secrecy and how secrets changed Mormons’ relationship to the government and their religious community.

2019-2020 | Sasha Coles
Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara

My project, titled “Homespun Respectability: Silk Worlds, Women’s Work, and the Making of Mormon Identity, 1850-1910s,” traces the history of silk production in the nineteenth-century American West to argue that early Latter-day Saints used labor, commerce, and commodities to negotiate their identities as religious outsiders and respectable American citizens.

2018-2019 | David Dmitri Hurlbut
Department of History, Boston University

In “Understanding the Rise of Mormonism in the Aba-Uyo Hinterlands of Nigeria, 1960-2005,” Hurlbut examines why the Igbo and Ibibio of Southern Nigeria abandoned established mission churches and African indigenous churches in order to join the LDS Church in the late-twentieth century. It also asks how this religious change affected not only the LDS Church’s policies and practices, but also Igbo and Ibibio culture. This project will provide insights into religious conversion in Africa, cultural change, and the transformation of Mormonism into a global faith during the second half of the 20th century.