Joseph Smith Lecture: Dr. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, “Mormonism Through an African Lens”
October 19, 2024
Dr. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, UVA’s new Director and Professor of Mormon Studies, delivered the tenth annual Joseph Smith Lecture on October 19th, 2024, entitled “Mormonism Through an African Lens.”
Professor Maffly-Kipp spoke on Mormonism’s practice in Africa in light of the Church’s growing membership on the continent.
LECTURE SLIDES (coming soon!)
About Maffly-Kipp
Professor Maffly-Kipp is a distinguished scholar in American religious history, with a special interest in the religious traditions of the American West. This particular focus brought her into the field of Mormon Studies, where she has become an influential interpreter of Latter-day Saint history, and a shaper of the discipline as it begins to examine 21st Century Mormonism, especially outside of North America. In so doing, Professor Maffly-Kipp has written numerous influential works on Mormonism, religion in the American West, and African American religious history.
Her most recent publication is “‘A Marvelous Work:’ Reading Mormonism in West Africa,” a volume of the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. Professor Maffly-Kipp has many achievements, including a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she also served as former President of the American Society of Church History and the Mormon History Association.
Her academic influence has spanned many classrooms across the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington University in St. Louis. To read more about Professor Maffly-Kipp’s approach to Mormon Studies, read this transcript from the inaugural Mormon Studies lecture event at the University of Virginia, which she delivered in 2014.
