Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is joining the Mormon Studies Review editorial team as an associate editor alongside Morgan Davis and Benjamin Park. Review editor Spencer Fluhman invited Inouye especially in order to broaden the Review’s reach in international studies. “We’re thrilled to have Dr. Inouye join our editorial staff,” Fluhman said. “She brings world class training, a sharp editorial eye, and a global vision for Mormon studies. The Review will certainly benefit from her intellectual gifts.”
About the new associate editor
Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is a lecturer in the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics at the University of Auckland and an expert on modern Chinese history and Asian religion. She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2011. Her first foray into Mormon studies was in 2003 when she participated in the summer seminar at BYU’s Joseph Fielding Smith Institute under the direction of Claudia Bushman. (This summer seminar is now housed here at the Maxwell Institute.) Inouye subsequently worked as an Archival Acquisitions Specialist for the Church History Department, where she interviewed Asian American Latter-day Saints in North America and began participating more generally in scholarly conversations.Her article on global Mormon history, “The Oak and the Banyan,” was published in the Mormon Studies Review volume 1 (2013). She has also written an essay on culture and agency in Asian Mormon women’s experience as part of a forthcoming volume on women and the LDS Church (University of Utah Press, 2015). Her essay on Mormon missionary experience, “Mornings and Nights,” won first place in Irreantum’s annual creative nonfiction contest in 2009.
Melissa has taught history of American religion at the University of Hong Kong and Chinese history at Loyola Marymount University and California State University Los Angeles. She has recently relocated to Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband and four children after three years in Hong Kong.