2021 MHA Board Nominees

For President-Elect: Richard Turley Jr.

Richard E. Turley Jr. retired on March 31, 2020, after a long career in which he oversaw the Church History, Family History, Public Affairs, and Church Communication Departments of the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has authored or edited numerous books on Latter-day Saint and Western U.S. history and helped create the Church Historian’s Press, the Joseph Smith Papers, FamilySearch, the Church History Library, and Saints: The History of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. He has been a member of the Mormon History Association for some thirty years and a frequent presenter at MHA conferences.

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For Student Representative: Dwain Coleman

Dwain Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at the University of Iowa. His dissertation examines the postwar lives of Black veterans and their families in Midwestern states like Iowa and Kansas. He is also a founding member and co-director of the Iowa Colored Conventions Digital Project. The project explores the participation of Black Iowans in the nineteenth century civil rights movement known as the Colored Conventions movement. Dwain has been a member of MHA since 2017 and is currently working on an article that examines the influence of the American frontier environment in the early development of the Latter-day Saint movement. 

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For Publicity Chair: Sasha Coles

Sasha Coles recently completed the PhD program in US history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores how acts of production and consumption shape religious belief and practice, and vice versa. Her dissertation, “Homespun Respectability: Silk Worlds, Women’s Work, and the Making of Mormon Identity,” examines silk production in western Mormon settlements from the 1850s to the 1910s. Some of her findings can be found in the Fall 2021 issue of the Journal of Women’s History. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was the Tanner Humanities Center Fellow in Latter-day Saints Studies at the University of Utah. She has received research support from the Huntington Library, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, the Western History Association, and the Mormon Women’s History Initiative.

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If you would like to suggest a different Mormon History Association member for any of the above board member positions, please email: vote@mormonhistoryassociation.org.