Public Scholarship (Public Writing)
2022 “What do the Nation of Islam and Marjorie Taylor Greene Have in Common?”
Religion and Politics
2021 “Bowling Together: Friendship and Relationship Building in Graduate School”
AHA Perspectives
2021 “A Malcolm for Our Times”
Religion and Politics
2017 “NEH Teaches Us What it Means to be Human”
Salt Lake Tribune
Public Scholarship (Public Presentations)
2022 Radical Roots of Antiracism: Malcolm, Martin, and Mrs. Hamer
Park City Museum, Park City, Utah
2022 “The Difference is in Method”: Political Options for Black Liberation
Sema Hadithi: Utah’s African American Heritage and Culture Foundation (Keynote)
Salt Lake City, UT
2021 Race and Religion: Building Bridges with Who? And to Where?
Utah Valley University
2021 Contexts for the Genesis Group’s Founding
Sema Hadithi: African American Heritage and Culture Foundation
2020 Pandemic Pedagogy: Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Brigham Young University, College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences
2019 What Made Martin Luther King, Jr. So Successful?
Books & Bridges Lecture
Salt Lake City, UT
Slavery and Religion in American History
(Producer and Host)
In Development
Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of the United States—or how its legacies still influence us today. The same can be said for religion, which is often not addressed in full or with nuance because of the personal and potentially sensitive nature of discussing belief and practice. In attempt to remedy this, I’m developing a podcast and pedagogy project related to slavery in the land that became the United States for high school and college students, modeled after the Teaching Hard History Initiative and Podcast.
Century of Black Mormons Project
Century of Black Mormons is a digital history database designed to document and recover what was lost—the identities and voices of Black Mormons during the faith’s first one hundred years (1830 to 1930). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never tracked membership by race and so official Church baptism and confirmation records are not always useful. Yet documents do exist that have allowed us to identify Black Latter-day Saints, name them, and collect basic biographical information about them.
Rocky Mountain American Religion Seminar
(Director)
The Rocky Mountain American Religion Seminar invites scholars from Intermountain West to discuss developing and cutting-edge scholarship on American religion. More than twenty scholars have shared their work with the seminar.