CALL FOR PAPERS
Mormon History Association’s 57th Annual Conference
“Landscape, Art, and Religion: The Intermountain West and the World”
Utah State University Campus, Logan, Utah; June 2-5, 2022
For its 57th Annual Conference in Logan, Utah, the Mormon History Association has joined forces with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts to create a program that we hope will bring an art element into the sessions. We have selected a theme which we believe will evoke provocative historical papers and also suggest art topics, meaning all the arts: literature, visual art, music, film, theater, architecture, design, and so forth.
The theme, “Landscape, Art, and Religion: The Intermountain West and the World,” stems from the belief that landscape and the natural environment give birth to and influence the cultures and societies of the various peoples who inhabit them. Social organization, core beliefs, economies, art, and human expression are formed by the landscapes that give people life.The West or intermountain region is a cosmopolitan region in which Indigenous and European cultures have intersected for centuries. Various peoples and their art culture, and diverse genders existed before Mormon settlement, and those peoples exhibited continuities and transformations after settlement.The intermountain landscape and culture influenced many aspects of nineteenth-century Mormon settler life. In the twentieth century, though the Intermountain West remained a heartland of Mormon culture, Mormonism began adapting to other spaces, cultural and physical, as it spread through the Americas, the Pacific Islands, Europe, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.
The MHA program committee invites scholars young and old, local and global, to investigate all aspects of this theme. Because of the collaboration with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, we hope many will take the occasion to explore artistic dimensions of society and culture. How are the riches and the tensions of Mormonism’s natural settings manifest in literature, music, the visual arts, film, and all the other art disciplines?
Of course, as always, proposals on all aspects of Mormon history are welcomed. We hope to attract the best current scholarship and encourage submissions that include diverse sets of participants, addressing racial and ethnic, gender, religious, LGBTQ, and disability-based diversities. Proposals that reflect MHA’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion are most likely to be accepted.
Please submit (1) a 300-word abstract for each paper or presentation and (2) a one-page CV for each presenter, including email and cell phone contact information. Full session proposals should include the session title and a 150-word abstract outlining the session’s theme. Individuals may only be included as presenters in one proposal per conference. Previously published papers are not eligible for presentation at MHA. Limited financial assistance for travel and lodging at the conference is available to student presenters and some international presenters. Proposals from international presenters or others who cannot attend the meeting in person will be considered for the online version of the conference. All presenters–including poster session presenters and online presenters–must be MHA members and registered for the conference format (in-person or online) in which they present.
The deadline for proposals is November 15, 2021. Send proposals to the program co-chairs at logan2022@mormonhistoryassociation.org. Acknowledgment of receipt will be sent immediately. Notification of acceptance/rejection will be made by January 15, 2022.
Richard Bushman
Kristine Haglund
2022 Program Committee Co-chairs
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
Hi Kristine!
I could try to submit something for this. Thanks for encouraging me to start reading the blog again. It helps. I just got finished working at Utah State University’s Center for Student Analytics. A lot of the job was just technical, like using computer coding stuff to analyze student grades and predict factors that measure student likeliness to graduate–“persistence”.
But it was amazing how a lot of the cultural aspects of how people approach ethics and values at this university reflect a lot of what I have read about in Dialogue. I haven’t read your Eugene England book yet, but it’s on my reading list. One time as I was driving home work, I saw Michael Ballam’s car parked in the parking lot and thought it was funny. It was an old disco 70s car from the 70s that said “BALLAM” on the license plate. His music students are lucky, and I think they’re also lucky they’re too young to understand the inside joke many older Utahns hear when they hear Michael Ballam’s name.
My neighbor Riley invited me to come to sacrament with him and his wife today, so I look forward to spending some time with him. Here’s the link to the page with my staff picture, my coworkers, and the three awesome undergraduates I managed. I actually designed or re-designed the configuration of how the website looks right now. Wild job. Hope you had good experiences working at Harvard! Miss you.
Alasdair Ekpenyong
https://www.usu.edu/ais/analytics/