Attendees to this year’s JWHA annual conference have the opportunity to listen these experts – learn more about them below!
Richard P. Howard Lecture
Dr. Amy DeRogatis
Intimate Exposure: The Charley Douglass Daguerreotype and American Religious History
Professor of religion and American culture and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. She is the author of Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2015) and, Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2003) and numerous articles and essays on religion, sexuality and gender.
She is currently at work on a third book, “Mormon King” about James Jesse Strang and the Strangite community on Beaver Island, MI. DeRogatis is the co-director (with Isaac Weiner, OSU) of the American Religious Sounds Project, a collaborative digital initiative, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, to document and interpret the diversity of American religious life by attending to its varied sonic cultures.
Keynote Speaker
Spencer W. McBride
Joseph Smith’s Presidential Campaign and the Quest for Religious Freedom
Associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, he earned a doctorate in history from Louisiana State University and is the author of multiple books on religion and American politics, including Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Listen as Spencer introduces his keynote.
Presidential Address & Banquet – Formal Evening, Black Tie Optional
Christin Mackay, President
Mr. Smith Goes to Salt Lake City: Fred M. in Utah 1904-1906
Christin is the Director of the Joseph Smith Historic Site in Nauvoo, Illinois. She has served JWHA as Journal Book Review Editor, Board Member, Treasurer and now President. She was published in Ancient Order of Things: Essays on the Mormon Temple (Signature Books 2019). Along with her husband Lachlan, Christin won the JWHA Best Article Award for “A Time of Transition: The Kirtland Temple 1838-80” JWHA Journal 18 1998: 133-48. Since she was a college student, Christin has lived on the Restoration Trail, from Lamoni, Iowa where she graduated from Graceland University with a B.A. in History, to Kirtland, Ohio and the Kirtland Temple, to Nauvoo, Illinois and the Joseph Smith Historic Site.
The Presidential Banquet will take place at the Uptown Market, Independence, Missouri
