The First Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology is scheduled to begin on June 9th, at the BYU London Centre in London, England.
The seminar is sponsored by the Mormon Theology Seminar in partnership with the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University and with support from the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies and the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding.
“The support of the Maxwell Institute and the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies has been invaluable for this seminar,” says Joe Spencer, co-director of the Mormon Theology Seminar. “We simply could not hold a live seminar without their partnership, and we’re really looking forward to the productive discussions that will emerge in this setting.”
The 2014 participants are:
George Handley (Brigham Young University, Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature)
Erin Olsen (University of California San Diego, Environmental Sociology)
Benjamin Peters (University of Tulsa, Communication)
Julie M. Smith (Independent Scholar, Biblical Studies)
Michael Ulrich (Université de Franche-Comté, Mathematics)
Miranda Wilcox (Brigham Young University, English)
“We’re glad to have a nice interdisciplinary spread among the participants,” notes Adam Miller, director of the Mormon Theology Seminar. “And we were pleased with the number of strong applications we received from both senior scholars and graduate students. While it made the selection process more difficult, it portends well for the future of both the Seminar and of Mormon Studies more generally.”
The participants will engage in a close reading of 1 Nephi 1 through daily discussions throughout the first week of the seminar. The second week will be spent workshopping papers that emerge from these discussions. These papers will be presented during the seminar’s culminating conference, which will be held on June 20th. Recordings of the conference proceedings will be made available here on the Mormon Theology Seminar website.
This seminar is under the direction of Adam Miller and Joseph Spencer with assistance from Brian Hauglid, director of the Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, and James Faulconer, a Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding and the director of the BYU London Centre.
For more information about the Mormon Theology Seminar, its mission, and archives of its past work, visit www.mormontheologyseminar.org.
For more information about the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, visit http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu.
For more information about the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, visit http://willes.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu.
