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). [2023]