Brigham Young University’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Laurie Maffly-Kipp as a visiting scholar and affiliate faculty. She will join our research community beginning in mid-January.
Dr. Maffly-Kipp is the current Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. After completing her Ph.D. in American History at Yale University, she taught both American and Religious Studies for twenty-four years at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her distinguished career, she has served as president of the American Society of Church History and the Mormon History Association. Her teaching and research focuses on African American religions, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the history of religion in the United States. In addition to writing the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Mormon, her publications include Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Harvard University Press, 2010), Religion and Society in Frontier California (Yale University Press, 1994), and co-edited collections such as Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (University of Utah Press, 2008).
Maxwell Institute executive director Spencer Fluhman is excited to welcome Dr. Maffly-Kipp to the Institute. “Dr. Maffly-Kipp is a celebrated scholar of religion in the United States and a careful observer of the Latter-day Saint past. Her insights and scholarship continue to enrich our Maxwell Institute scholars and others, far and wide. She will be a great addition to the BYU campus community during 2023.”
Learn more about Dr. Maffly-Kipp here; read her contribution to the Mormon Studies Review here; and enjoy her interview on the Maxwell Institute Podcast here.