Spencer Fluhman

Executive Director

Featured Publications

“A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)

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Email: fluhman@byu.edu
Phone: 801.422.9229

Spencer Fluhman is executive director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and associate professor of history at Brigham Young University (BYU). He graduated summa cum laude from BYU and received masters and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Journal of Religion and Society, Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies Quarterly, and Mormon Historical Studies. He won the T. Edgar Lyon Award for Best Article of the Year from the Mormon History Association in 2009. His book, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America(University of North Carolina Press, 2012) won the Mormon History Association’s Best First Book Award in 2013. He has held office in the American Academy of Religion, American Society of Church History, and Mormon History Association. He served as editor-in-chief of Mormon Studies Reviewfrom 2013-19. He was visiting professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University in 2015 and visiting distinguished professor of Mormon Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2020.

BYU Devotional (2019)

Selected Publications

BOOKS

“A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)

To Be Learned Is Good: Essays on Faith and Scholarship in Honor of Richard Lyman Bushman (Provo, Ut: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2017)

ARTICLES

“The Triumph and Glory of the Lamb: Doctrine and Covenants 76 in Its Historical Context,” Ensign (October 2017).

“Communitarianism and Consecration in Mormonism,” in Philip L. Barlow and Terryl L. Givens, eds., Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 577-90.

“‘A Subject That Can Bear Investigation’: Anguish, Faith, and Joseph Smith’s Youngest Plural Wife,” in No Weapon Shall Prosper: New Light on Sensitive Issues, ed. Robert L. Millet (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011), 105–119.

“Authority, Power, and the ‘Government of the Church of Christ,’” in Richard N. Holzapfel and Kent P. Jackson, eds., Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer (Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2010), 195-231.

“An ‘American Mahomet’: Joseph Smith, Muhammad, and the Problem of Prophets in Antebellum America,” Journal of Mormon History 34, no. 3 (Summer, 2008): 23-45.

THE BOOK OF MORMON: BRIEF THEOLOGICAL INTRODUCTIONS
General Editor, with Philip L. Barlow