MHA Board Members

David Howlett

President

Born and raised in Independence, Missouri, David Howlett is the Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the author of Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space (University of Illinois Press, 2014; winner of MHA’s Best First Book Award) and co-author of Mormonism: The Basics (Routledge, 2017). An eighth-generation member of Community of Christ, he volunteers as one of the World Church Historians for the denomination, as well as on the advisory board for the Community of Christ Seminary, a graduate theological institution.

A longtime MHA attendee and presenter, he has served as a conference program co-chair, a program committee member, a nominating committee member, and on the board of editors for the Journal of Mormon History. He also serves on the steering committee for the Global Mormon Studies Network and the advisory board for the Restoration Scripture Critical Editions Project. David is married to the Rev. Anna Woofenden, and they have a gloriously joyful nine-month-old daughter, Jarena. At the time of writing, Jarena was just beginning to attempt her first steps.

Matthew Bowman

Past President

Matthew Bowman holds degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Utah, where he studied American religious history and the history of Christianity. He is associate professor of religion and history and Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he directs the Center for Global Mormon Studies and teaches classes on American religion, twentieth century United States political and cultural history, religious globalization, and the supernatural.

He is the author or co-editor of several books, including The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012), Mormon Women in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (University of Utah, 2016), Christian: the Politics of a Word in America (Harvard, 2018), and the forthcoming The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters and the Fragmentation of America (Yale, 2023). He has been attending MHA since 2005, when he presented a paper on LDS Bigfoot folklore. Ever since that paper was welcomed, MHA has been his favorite academic conference.

Andrea Radke-Moss

President-elect

Andrea G. Radke-Moss received her B.A. (1992) and M.A. (1995) in History from BYU, where she took classes from Tom Alexander, Ted Warner, Fred Gowans, Martha Bradley, Brian Cannon, and Bob Westover, emphasizing the history of the American West and Native American Studies, and with a smattering of Mormon history, but not enough to become a passion or even a hobby.

At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (PhD, 2002), Andrea focused on women’s history of the American West. Encouraged by mentors John Wunder and Charlene Porsild, she began dabbling in Mormon women’s history. Her first MHA paper on the Women of Zion’s Camp won the 1999 Juanita Brooks Award. At UNL, Andrea embraced the idea that Mormon women’s history is western women’s history. Her book, Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (2008) examined the experiences of female students at coeducational land-grant colleges, including the Utah Agricultural College. Andrea’s research covers topics in both western and Mormon women’s history, including homesteading, polygamy, suffrage, Relief Society/YWMIA leadership, and wartime violence. Her articles on women in the 1838 Mormon-Missouri War have earned the MHA Best Article Award (2015) and Best Article in Mormon Women’s History (2018). She currently researches western women’s participation at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a project which first began with a study of Mormon/Utah women at the Chicago Fair.

Andrea has presented papers, chaired and commented on many MHA panels, and served on the MHA Board as Membership Committee Chair and as a Nominating Committee member. She is most proud to be one of the first active members of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team (2004). She teaches at BYU-Idaho and lives in Rexburg with her husband, Stephen, and their two children.

Christine Blythe

Executive Director

Christine Elyse Blythe earned her MA in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and a BA in Religious Studies from Utah State University. Her Master's thesis "Vernacular theology: home birth and the Mormon tradition" examined the personal narratives and beliefs of Latter Saint women--home birthing mothers, midwives, and doulas. She is co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Tradition (University of Utah, 2022).

Christine is the archivist of the William A. Wilson Folklore Archives at Brigham Young University's L. Tom Perry Special Collections. In 2020, she collected over six hundred narratives from members of the LDS and Restoration churches about their experiences navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. She has served as co-president of the Folklore Society of Utah and editor of the Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies housed at the Religious Studies Program at Utah State University.

Jenny Hale Pulsipher

Publications Chair

Jenny Hale Pulsipher is Professor of history at Brigham Young University, specializing in early American and Native American history. Her first book, "Subjects unto the Same King": Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), was selected as a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title in 2006. Her second book, Swindler Sachem: The American Indian who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (Yale University Press, 2018), received the 2019 Norris and Carole Hundley award from the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch for the best book on any historical subject. Pulsipher has also published articles in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, The New England Quarterly, and The Massachusetts Historical Review. Her current project is a biography of her Shoshone ancestors, Sally Exervier and Adelaide Exervier Brown.

Michelle Graabek

Global Outreach Chair

Michelle Graabek earned her PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her research lies at the intersection of migration, gender, and religious history. Her current research focuses on Danish Latter-day Saint immigrant women in Utah during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Michelle also has a BA in Archaeology from the University of Reading, where she began her interest in Scandinavian migrant cultural identity, by writing her dissertation on Viking art and metalwork found in the Danelaw in England. She expanded her focus in cultural studies, and interest in public history, with an MA in Cultural Heritage Studies from University College London. Between her MA and PhD, Michelle worked for several years in public history, managing education and events programmes at historic houses in England. She continues to have a research interest in public history, particularly the representation of marginalised groups, and a passion for widening access to history and arts.

Michelle has since 2021 served on the Executive Committee of EuroSeminar, organising conferences and webinars for young Latter-day Saint scholars and professionals in Europe, and now serves on its advisory board. Since 2021 Michelle has also served on the steering committee of the Global Mormon Studies Network, where she was an organiser of the 2023 conference, sponsored in part by MHA.

Brooke LeFevre

Student Representative

Brooke R. LeFevre is currently a PhD student at Baylor University studying history with a focus on women, religion, and medicine in the 19th century. She graduated with an MA in history from Utah State University where she wrote about the intersection of polygamy and women's infertility. She also has a BS in psychology from Brigham Young University. Brooke first started attending MHA in 2019 and has loved how supportive the association is for graduate students. Her article, "I Would Not Risk My Salvation to Any Man: Eliza R. Snow's Challenge to Salvific Coverture," published in the Journal of Mormon History, won the Jan Shipps Best Article Award from MHA in 2022. Her future research focuses on the intersection of religion and women's reproductive medicine.

Sasha Coles

Publicity Chair

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.

Spencer McBride

Awards Chair

Spencer W. McBride, PhD, is Associate Managing Historian of the Joseph Smith Papers. In addition to working as co-editor of three volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers, he is the creator, writer, and host of the project's five podcast series. McBride has published multiple books on the history of religion and American political culture, including Pulpit and Nation (University of Virginia Press, 2016), Contingent Citizens (Cornell University Press, 2020), Joseph Smith for President (Oxford University Press, 2021), and New York's Burned-Over District (Cornell University Press, 2023). His writing has also been published in the Deseret News and the Washington Post.

John G. Turner

Liaison

I am Professor of Religious Studies and History at George Mason University. For me, Mormon History is local history. I grew up just outside of Rochester, NY, not too far from Palmyra. One of my encounters with Latter-day Saint history came through the Hill Cumorah Pageant, my graduate studies in American religious history then kindled an abiding passion in the subject, and I remain captivated by its human drama, theological and social innovation, and archival richness. The fruits of this passion are two books: Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (winner of MHA’s 2012 Best Biography Award) and The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (2016).

One of the things I love about MHA is its openness. It's not just for folks with PhDs. It's for anyone who takes an interest in the subject, and it's best when people from all sorts of backgrounds get involved, even people who have no current or past affiliation or connection with the churches that have their origin in Joseph Smith's visions and revelations. I'm Presbyterian, but when I attended my first MHA meeting back in 2007, I immediately felt welcome. My wish is that newcomers and oldtimers alike have that same experience.

Heather Stone

Finance and Fundraising

Heather Stone is the President of TETON Sports, a sixteen-year-old outdoor gear company headquartered in Utah. She is on the Board of Governors of the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce and co-chairs the Small Business Committee for that organization. She was formerly on the board and the credit committee of the Utah Microenterprise Loan Fund.

She holds a PhD from the University of Utah in Communication, with a dual emphasis in Writing and Rhetoric Studies, as well as an MBA from the University of Phoenix and a BA from Brigham Young University. Her work was awarded Dissertation of the Year by the Religious Communication Association and the CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. She also received the Thomas Stockham Medal for Conspicuously Effective Teaching from the University of Utah. For her dissertation, she interviewed 55 women about their experiences growing up in the “Mormon corridor” in the 1980s/90s and then helped several narrators present their experiences for themselves in a public history exhibit at MHA 2018. She has been published in Digital Humanities Quarterly and the Journal of Communication and Religion. She and co-author Alecia Hart are working on a book for Latter-day Saint young adults who feel claustrophobic in their church communities.

With a passion for public history, Heather and her historian husband Kelly helped envision and endow MHA’s Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award. Heather served as the first program committee chair for that award in 2021.

Caroline Kline

Membership Chair

Caroline Kline is the assistant director of the Center for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She holds a PhD in religion from CGU, and her areas of interest include contemporary Latter-day Saint women's communities, feminist theory, and oral history. Kline is the author of a number of articles or book chapters that center on Mormonism and gender, including "The Mormon Conception of Women's Nature and Role: A Feminist Analysis," (Feminist Theology, 2014) and "Saying Goodbye to the Final Say: The Softening and Reimagining of Mormon Male Headship Ideologies," (Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, 2016). Her book, Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness (2022), explores Latter-day Saint women's lived experiences in Botswana, Mexico, and the United States.