The 21st Annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture will take place in the Logan Tabernacle, 50 N. Main Street, on Thursday, September 24, at 7 p.m. The title is "Narrating Jane: Telling the Story of an Early African American Mormon Woman." Jane Elizabeth Manning James was among the early African American converts to Mormonism. After joining the church in the early 1840s, James remained a faithful member until her death in Salt Lake City in 1908. Although she was well-known among church members during her lifetime, James was largely forgotten after her death. The lecture will be presented by Quincy D. Newell, a specialist in the religious history of the American West. After more than a decade on the Religious Studies faculty at the University of Wyoming, she now teaches in the Religious Studies department at Hamilton College. Newell is currently writing a biography of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Quincy D. Newell, a native Oregonian, earned her bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, and her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2004 she headed back west to teach at the University of Wyoming, where she was on the faculty for 11 years. Newell studies American religious history, focusing on the construction of racial, gender, and religious identities in the nineteenth-century American West. Her first book examined the ways Native Americans around the San Francisco Bay adapted, adopted, and rejected Catholicism during the Spanish colonial period; these days, she spends her time thinking and writing about nineteenth-century African American and Native American Mormons.
Areas of expertise: American religious history; interreligious contact; religious experience of racial/ethnic and religious minorities; Native American religious history; African American religious history; Mormonism; gender and religion
