2020 President’s Message

My dear MHA friends & colleagues,

To say this has been a difficult year is an understatement. Our daily lives have been altered, our work disrupted, ourselves isolated, and for some there is the pain of having someone close to you seriously impacted by COVID-19. From the beginning, every action we’ve taken as a board has been with you and your safety in mind. We decided to postpone MHA’s 2020 conference in Rochester, New York, when it became clear we could not safely hold a large-group gathering this summer. Fortunately, MHA’s Executive Director Barbara Jones Brown and Financial Chair David Simmons were successful in renegotiating all of MHA’s future conference contracts without financial penalty, and we’re now rescheduled to make MHA Rochester a reality June 10-13, 2021, provided it is safe to do so by then. With the able leadership of incoming president Jenny Lund and the continued efforts of program committee co-chairs Joseph Stuart and Anne Berryhill, we are developing new plans for a great conference next year.

Before we focus on the 2021 conference, however, I’m pleased to announce that beginning on Saturday, June 6, 2020–the weekend  originally scheduled for our Rochester conference–we’ll make available an exciting digital conference at www.mormonhistoryassociation.org. The conference will include video recordings of plenaries, panel discussions, individual presentations, and many of the special events we hold each at each annual conference —voting on new board members, an awards ceremony, a student social hour via Zoom, the introduction of our next president, and a devotional speaker, to name a few. I will address you in what I’m calling a Presidential Conversation, providing some suggestions for expanding the way we write and teach about people of color, indigenous communities, and immigrants in Mormonism. My formal Presidential Address will be published, as usual, in the Journal of Mormon History.

Throughout this year, the board has also been working on important “infrastructure” efforts that we hope will strengthen MHA. Barbara and David have been developing a budgetary system that will  help us make projections for several years into the future. Awards Chair Benjamin Park and Global Outreach Chair Vinna Chintaram co-chaired a committee that shared ideas on how to better “internationalize” the Journal of Mormon History. We hope that this will help us recruit more articles, reviews and essays on international Mormon history, and from international historians. 

Vinna, Membership Chair Farina King, and I are developing an affiliates program similar to that of the American Historical Association and the Smithsonian, which will allow us to partner with numerous entities that do Mormon history or similar religious history. With these we’ll be able to better get the word out on what we are doing, and will provide us opportunities to co-sponsor conferences, workshops, and other activities with other similarly focused organizations. Finally, Liaison Chair Sara Patterson headed a committee to assess and update our bylaws and handbook. This should help us become more efficient and prepare us to deal with challenges like those brought by COVID-19, which are likely to become more frequent as we face climate change, a continued pandemic, and instability of the economy. These changes, however, will not become official until the membership has an opportunity to weigh in when we congregate in Rochester next year.

Our hiring of co-editors for the Journal of Mormon History—Christopher Blythe and Jesse Embry–will allow us to expand our outreach to more scholars while maintaining the high quality of editing that we’ve come to expect from theJMH. There are a number of other things that we have been working on to make sure that we evolve as an organization. I was fortunate to work with an outstanding executive director, a wise board, a supportive past president, and a very capable president-elect to accomplish what we have this year. 

The fact that I will not be presiding over what was going to be a great conference commemorating the 200^th anniversary of the First Vision is heartbreaking, a loss I will carry with me for a long time. Nonetheless, being MHA president has been one of the highlights of my scholarly life, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity to have served you.

Stay safe, be productive, and please let’s congregate together next year in Rochester. Hasta vernos otra vez (till we meet again)!

Ignacio M. García

MHA President