Project Team
CHURCH HISTORY DEPARTMENT EXECUTIVES
Executive Director, Church History Department, and Church Historian and Recorder
Assistant Executive Director, Church History Department
Managing Director, Church History Department
NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD
Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University, and former Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, Claremont Graduate University
Neal A. Maxwell Senior Research Fellow, Brigham Young University
Founder and Former General Editor, Joseph Smith Papers
Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University
Editor in Chief, The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History and Chair, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University
DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS
GENERAL EDITORS
MANAGING HISTORIAN
ASSOCIATE MANAGING HISTORIAN
EDITORIAL MANAGER
ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL MANAGERS
PRODUCT MANAGER
RESEARCH AND REVIEW EDITOR
PROJECT ARCHIVIST
VOLUME COEDITORS
WEB EDITORIAL LEAD
EDITORIAL STAFF
RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
TRANSCRIPTION SPECIALIST
BIOGRAPHIES OF CHURCH HISTORY DEPARTMENT EXECUTIVES
was sustained as a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on March 31, 2018. He is currently serving as executive director of the Church History Department and as church historian and recorder. Prior to being called as a General Authority Seventy, he had been serving as a member of the Fifth Quorum of the Seventy in the Utah North Area. Elder McKay received a BA in English from Brigham Young University in 1984. In 1987 he received a JD from Brigham Young University. From 1987 to 2018 Elder McKay practiced law in Oregon and Utah. He is currently serving as the assistant executive director of the Church History Department.
was sustained as a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 5, 2014. At the time of his call, he had been serving as a member of the Fourth Quorum of the Seventy in the Caribbean Area. Elder Martinez completed premedical studies at the University of Mississippi in 1977. In 1981 he received a medical degree from the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, and he completed a family practice residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1984. He worked for twenty years as a physician and medical consultant before retiring in 2004. He is currently serving as the assistant executive director of the Church History Department and as the second counselor in the North America Utah Area Presidency.
is managing director of the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served as director of publications at the Church History Department from 2010 to 2019. He has coedited two recent volumes from the Church Historian’s Press: The First Fifty Years of Relief Society and Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846. He has also authored or coauthored books with Oxford University Press and Yale University Press, including award-winning biographies of Parley P. Pratt and Thomas L. Kane. Grow has published in various scholarly journals, including Journal of the Early Republic, Church History, American Nineteenth-Century History, and Journal of Mormon History. He was previously an assistant professor of history and director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. He received his PhD in American history from the University of Notre Dame.
NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD BIOGRAPHIES
a member of the National Advisory Board of the Joseph Smith Papers, served as a general editor of the Papers from the project’s founding until 2013. He is Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and former Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He received his BA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. He taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware before joining the Columbia faculty. His published works include From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (1967), King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985), and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992). He has served as president of the Mormon History Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. His books on Latter-day Saint themes include Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984), and Believing History (2004).
a member of the Joseph Smith Papers National Advisory Board, is a Neal L. Maxwell Senior Fellow at Brigham Young University. Previously he was James A. Bostwick Chair and Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Richmond in Virginia. He received a BA in comparative literature from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his religious studies work are several titles with Oxford University Press. His works include The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths and the Construction of Heresy; By the Hand of the Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion; When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought; and the series The Foundations of Mormon Thought. He has also published essays in Romanticism, literary theory, and cultural studies.
is a founder of the Joseph Smith Papers and a member of the National Advisory Board. He served as a general editor of the Papers from the project’s founding until 2013. He received an MA degree in Church history from Brigham Young University. His career includes working for the Archives and the History Division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1964 to 1981, followed by nineteen years’ service at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University. His years of gathering and publishing Joseph Smith documents laid the groundwork for the current Joseph Smith Papers. His publications include Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (1984, 2001); Papers of Joseph Smith, vols. 1 and 2 (1989, 1991); Brigham Young’s Letters to His Sons (1974); and numerous articles dealing with aspects of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint history. He is a past president of the Mormon History Association.
a member of the National Advisory Board of the Joseph Smith Papers, is a distinguished professor in the humanities at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her BA from Amherst College in English and religion and completed a PhD in American history at Yale University. She taught previously at Amherst College, Yale University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she chaired the Religious Studies Department for five years. Her research and teaching focus on the Latter-day Saints, African American religions, religion on the Pacific borderlands of the Americas, and issues of intercultural contact. The recipient of numerous fellowships and grants and the editor or author of many books and articles, she has most recently published Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Harvard University Press, 2010); American Scriptures, a Penguin Classics anthology of sacred texts (2010); and Women’s Work, a coedited collection of writings by African American women historians (Oxford University Press, 2010).
a member of the National Advisory Board of the Joseph Smith Papers, is the editor in chief of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Martin holds a PhD in history from the University of Melbourne and is a graduate of the public history program at Arizona State University, where she earned an MA in American history and a graduate certificate in scholarly publishing and documentary editing. She joined the staff of the Adams Papers in 2008 and has served as project director since 2015. In addition to ten volumes of the Adams Papers, she has also published on the ways material culture can be used to reframe goldfield narratives.
a member of the Joseph Smith Papers National Advisory Board, is Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University and Chair, Department of Religious Studies. He received a BA degree from Calvin College, after which he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and University. He holds MA and PhD degrees from Kent State University. He taught at the University of Connecticut before joining the faculty at Yale in 1986. From 1991 until the present, he has served as the general editor, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, and general editor, Religion in America, a series with more than 30 books published to date. Among his published works, which include books, articles, review essays, and book reviews, are Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth (coedited with Kenneth Minkema and Caleb Maskell), the award-winning Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, and Stories of Faith, Stories of America: Religion in United States History (with Randall Balmer and Grant Wacker).
DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS BIOGRAPHY
is director of the Publications Division of the Church History Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He earned an MA in American history from the University of Utah. Matt is the author of A House for the Most High: The Story of the Original Nauvoo Temple (2007) and coeditor of Revelations in Context: The Stories behind the Sections of the Doctrine and Covenants (2016). His article on the origins of the women’s missionary program in the church won the Mormon History Association’s Best Article Award for 2018. He was previously the digital content manager for the Publications Division, and prior to that, director of web development and director of digital publishing for Deseret Book Company.
GENERAL EDITOR BIOGRAPHIES
is a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. Matthew holds a PhD in American and public history from Washington State University. He previously served as managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers and was the lead historian on three volumes of the Documents series. He has authored or coedited several books, including Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith’s Life and Character (Deseret Book, 2019), and has published articles in a variety of academic journals and scholarly anthologies. His research interests and expertise include environmental history, business and financial history, and the history of Zion’s Camp.
is the editorial manager and a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. He was formerly an editor for the Curriculum Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and before that he practiced law in Salt Lake City. He coedited Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith’s Life and Character (2019) and The Council of Fifty: What the Records Reveal about Mormon History (2017). He received a BA in English from Brigham Young University and a JD from the University of Utah.
is a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. He served as the project’s managing editor until 2012. He received history degrees from the University of Utah, the University of Virginia, and Brigham Young University. From 1972 until 1980, he was part of the History Division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with assignments both as a researcher and writer and as an archivist. He moved to Brigham Young University in 1980 when the History Division was transferred there to become the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. From 1986 through 2002, he served as managing director of that research institute and as a professor of church history and doctrine. From 1988 to 1991, he served as one of the editors for Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Most of his publications have focused on Brigham Young and early Utah or pre-Utah Latter-day Saint history, including Men with a Mission: The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the British Isles, 1837–1841. He has also published on Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint leadership. He served as president of the Mormon History Association from 2006 to 2007.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
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is a senior historian in the Church History Department and the senior research and review editor for the Joseph Smith Papers, where he also serves as a specialist in document analysis and documentary editing methodology. He holds a PhD in history from Arizona State University and has trained at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He has coedited several volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers. He is also coeditor of Foundational Texts of Mormonism (Oxford, 2018) and is the author of several articles on Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint history published in peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly venues.
is an associate editor for the Church Historian’s Press. She graduated from Weber State University with a BA in history and an emphasis in public history. She has been employed by the Church History Department since 2007 as a reference editor for the Joseph Smith Papers and Saints publications. While at university, she completed internships at the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg; Promontory Summit, Utah; Hill Aerospace Museum in Roy, Utah; and St. Benedict Archive in Ogden, Utah. She also interviewed and transcribed for the St. Benedict Archive Oral History Project and the Morgan County Historical Society Veterans Oral History Project.
has worked as a full-time volunteer for the Church History Department since 2005. She serves as a transcription specialist for the Joseph Smith Papers, and in her many years of service, she has transcribed more than 10,000 manuscript pages. She is an expert in deciphering nineteenth-century handwriting and is proficient in XML encoding. She is the mother of four, grandmother of sixteen, and great-grandmother of six. In her spare time, she enjoys cross-stitching.
is a volume editor for the Joseph Smith Papers. His work will appear in the Documents series. He received a BA and an MA in history from Brigham Young University and a PhD in American history from Texas Christian University. His dissertation was titled “‘Beyond the Pale of Human Sympathy’: Utah and the Reconstruction of the American West, 1848–1890.” His previous projects include assisting with research for numerous publications and Brigham Young University’s Education in Zion exhibition.
is an editor for the Church Historian’s Press. She earned a BA in humanities with an emphasis in English and an MA in English at Brigham Young University. She began her editing career working as a technical writer and editor at a nuclear engineering laboratory. After working for nine years in the Publishing Services Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she spent several more years as a freelance editor. She has taught courses in English and business communication at Brigham Young University, Eastern Idaho Technical College, and LDS Business College.
is a research assistant for the Joseph Smith Papers. She previously worked as an intern in the Publications Division of the Church History Library. She earned a BA in family history–genealogy at Brigham Young University. While at BYU, she was a research and teaching assistant for history and geography professors, a supervisor in the Harold B. Lee Library, and president of the Family History Club. Her research interests include Latter-day Saint women’s history, religious freedom history, and Spanish and German family history. Her paper “Latter-day Saint Women Fight for Their Rights: Religious Intolerance of Plural Marriage” was awarded the Carol Cornwall Madsen Award in Mormon Women’s History by the BYU History Department in 2020.
is an assistant editor for the Joseph Smith Papers. Her primary responsibility is preparing the Legal Records series for digital publication. She earned a BA in American studies and a minor in sociology from Brigham Young University. While at the university, she worked as a writer for the BYU Alumni Association, a research assistant in the Social Sciences department in the Harold B. Lee Library, and a legal assistant at a law firm. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in American studies at California State University, Fullerton.
is a historian and documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He holds a PhD in American history from Texas Christian University and an MA and a BA in history from Brigham Young University. David is the author of Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford, 2016), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was awarded the Robert M. Utley Prize by the Western History Association. He has published articles on Western and Latter-day Saint history in the Western Historical Quarterly, the Journal of Mormon History, and other peer-reviewed venues. His specialties for the project include the Latter-day Saint experience in Missouri, Joseph Smith’s legal papers, and relations between Latter-day Saints and Indians.
is a historian and volume editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He earned a BA in American studies from Brigham Young University and a PhD in American history from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in the cultural, ethnic, and religious history of the United States, with a particular focus on the American West, the Pacific, and modern Japan. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese American incarceration during World War II and is currently preparing a monograph on that subject. He has published articles in Utah Historical Quarterly and on the website Discover Nikkei and has presented research at conferences of the American Historical Association, Western History Association, Association for Asian American Studies, and Mormon History Association. In addition to his work in the Church History Department, he is an adjunct professor at Brigham Young University.
is project archivist for the Joseph Smith Papers. She received an MA in library and information science with an archival studies concentration from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is a digital archives specialist, a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists, and part of that organization’s Exam Development Committee (2019–2022).
is an editorial manager for the Church Historian’s Press. She is also a reference editor for the Joseph Smith Papers. She earned a BA in editing & publishing and minors in anthropology and design from Brigham Young University; she also received a professional development certification in project management from the University of Utah. She wrote a short essay, “‘Knowledge Saves a Man’: Joseph Smith’s Devotion to Learning,” for the book Know Brother Joseph (Deseret Book, 2019) and has reference edited scholarly articles and books for independent historians.
is a historian and archivist for the Joseph Smith Papers and coedited the five volumes in the Revelations and Translations series (published 2009, 2011, 2015, 2018, and 2021). He specializes in document and transcription analysis and previously served as an associate managing historian for the project. In 2005 he earned an MA degree in American history from Brigham Young University, and in 2009 he earned a second MA in library and information science with an archival concentration from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In 2019 he earned a PhD in history at the University of Utah. He completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in 2007. He has published several articles and presented papers at various scholarly conferences.
is an assistant editor for the Church Historian’s Press. She received a BA in editing and publishing with a minor in design from Brigham Young University. While at BYU, she was a copy editor for the social impact publication Ballard Brief, a research consultant at the Harold B. Lee Library, and a writer, editor, and designer for student publications such as Stance: Studies on the Family and Stowaway magazine. She also previously worked as a communications intern for BYU–Pathway Worldwide.
is an associate historian with the Joseph Smith Papers. He earned a PhD in history at the University of Utah, where he specialized in American religious and political thought. His dissertation, titled “In the Nation of Promise,” analyzes the varieties of Latter-day Saint political discourse that took shape during the twentieth century.
is an editorial assistant for the Joseph Smith Papers. Her responsibilities include transcribing and checking transcripts and preparing documents for digital publication. She received a BA in editing and publishing with a minor in digital humanities from Brigham Young University. While at BYU, she worked as an editor for Continuing Education and was the web team lead for Stowaway magazine.
Chase Kirkham is a historian and documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Claremont Graduate University, where he focused on nineteenth-century American religious history. His current research interests include historical theology and conceptions of God in early America. His work has been published in the Journal of Mormon History. His work with the Joseph Smith Papers Project will appear in volumes 13 and 15 of the Documents series.
is lead historian of the Financial Records series and a volume editor of the Documents series. She earned a BA with honors in history and a classical language certificate from Arizona State University and an MA in European and women’s history from Purdue University. She is currently a PhD candidate in early modern European history at the University of California, Irvine. Before joining the project, she was an instructor in the history department and religious studies program at the University of California, Irvine. In 2016, she completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in New Orleans.
is a volume editor of the Documents series of the Joseph Smith Papers. He was also a volume editor for Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846 in the Administrative Records series. He received his MA in US history from the University of Utah and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Utah. Before joining the Joseph Smith Papers, he worked as collections manager of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Mormon History and Mormon Historical Studies.
is the associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers. He earned a PhD in history from Louisiana State University and is the author of multiple books on religion and American politics, including Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2017) and Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2021)
is a historian and documentary editor for the Joseph Smith Papers. She completed a BA in American studies at Brigham Young University and an MS in history at Utah State University, where she held the Milner/Butler Editorial Fellowship at the Western Historical Quarterly. Her thesis, titled “‘The Mississippi of the West’: Religion, Conservatism, and Racial Politics in Utah, 1960–1978,” was awarded the Lester E. Bush Best Thesis Award by the Mormon History Association in 2018. Previous to joining the Joseph Smith Papers, she worked as a research assistant for the women’s history team at the Church History Department.
is the editorial lead for the Joseph Smith Papers website. Her primary assignment is preparing content for the project’s website. She received a BA in Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University and an MA in ancient civilizations and biblical studies from the University of Michigan. Previously she worked as a manager of data collection for a Civil War research project directed by the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago and as an assistant editor for the Occasional Papers series at Brigham Young University’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. She has also worked as an independent genealogist.
is an associate editor for the Church Historian’s Press, where she works on the Joseph Smith Papers. She previously worked for The Salt Lake Tribune, where she was a copy editor and award-winning arts reporter. Among highlights of her long and varied service there, she interviewed one of the Three Tenors, one of the Beastie Boys, and two of the original stars of Hamilton. She has a BA in journalism from Utah State University.
is a historian and documentary editor with the Joseph Smith Papers. He holds a PhD and MA in history from the University of Alabama and a BA in history from Brigham Young University. Adam is the author of The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory: Reconsidering Virginia’s Most Notorious Civil War Battlefield (Louisiana State University Press, 2019). He has also published articles in the Alabama Review, Civil War History, and the Journal of Military History and essays in Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith’s Life and Character and American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era. Adam specializes in nineteenth-century American history and is interested in the American Civil War, military history, Latin American history, and Latter-day Saint history. He has contributed to volumes 14 and 15 of the Joseph Smith Papers Documents series and is currently working on a documentary editing project focused on Brigham Young’s correspondence.
is an editor for the Church Historian’s Press. She studied at Brigham Young University, where she completed a BA and an MA in English. Laura began her editing career in the Curriculum Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She served for over a decade as managing editor of an editing service for BYU faculty. She has also been employed as a writing mentor for students seeking master’s degrees in the School of Education at Utah Valley University, as a freelance editor, and as a contract editor for the Church’s Publishing Services Department.
is an assistant editor for the Church Historian’s Press. He does reference editing on print and web content. He received a BA in technical communication from Utah State University and an MA in English at the University of Utah.
is the managing historian for the Joseph Smith Papers. He received a BA with honors in history from San Diego State University, an MA in public history from California State University, Sacramento, and a PhD in nineteenth-century United States history from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His book, Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), received the Charles Redd Center–Phi Alpha Theta Book Award for the Best Book on the American West, the Mormon History Association’s Best First Book Award, and the Utah State Historical Society’s Francis Armstrong Madsen Best History Book Award. Brent is also a coeditor of several volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers, a coeditor of Contingent Citizens: Shifting Perceptions of Latter-day Saints in American Political Culture (Cornell University Press, 2020), and the author of several book chapters and articles, including “A ‘distinction between Mormons and Americans’: Mormon Indian Missionaries, Federal Indian Policy, and the Utah War” (Utah Historical Quarterly, fall 2014), which won the Western History Association’s 2015 Arrington-Prucha Prize for Best Article on the History of Religion in the West.
is a volume editor of volume 2 (2011) and volume 3 (2015) in the Journals series and volumes 4 (2016), 7 (2018), 9 (2019), and 14 (2022) in the Documents series of the Joseph Smith Papers. He received MA and BA degrees in history from Brigham Young University. He is currently leading the William Clayton Nauvoo journals project and working on a book examining the causes of Joseph Smith’s assassination.
is an editor for the Church Historian’s Press. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in English language and a minor in editing, and she graduated from Arizona State University with an MA in English. During her free time, she works as a freelance editor and writer.
is an editor for the Church Historian’s Press. She received a BS in human development and an MA in English, with an emphasis in Victorian literature, from Brigham Young University. Prior to joining the project, she worked as an editorial lead for ProQuest, where she managed the elementary editions of CultureGrams―a leading reference database of cultural information on countries of the world.
is an editorial manager for the Church Historian’s Press. He received a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MA in American studies from the University of Utah; he also received a graduate certificate in digital humanities from the University of Victoria and completed training at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He is coeditor of A Zion Canyon Reader (University of Utah Press, 2014) and Settling the Valley, Proclaiming the Gospel: The General Epistles of the Mormon First Presidency (Oxford, 2017), and he has edited for BYU Magazine, the Liahona, and David R. Godine, Publisher.
is an editorial assistant for the Joseph Smith Papers. She graduated from Southern Utah University with a BA in creative writing and a technical writing certificate; she graduated from Clemson University with an MA in writing, rhetoric, and media. While at SUU, she worked as a writing tutor and served on the editorial staff of the campus literary magazine, the Kolob Canyon Review. She also worked as an editor for the South Carolina Review while at Clemson and completed an internship with Clemson University Press.
is the product manager for the Joseph Smith Papers. He is responsible for coordinating the development of the josephsmithpapers.org website. Additionally, he manages marketing and promotion of the project. He has worked in various management positions for the past decade, with an emphasis on digital communication. He holds two BA degrees, one in French and the other in international relations from Louisiana State University, and subsequently spent two years in Switzerland as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar completing an MA in international history and politics from The Graduate Institute, Geneva.