Announcing the 2025 UVA Clyde Research Fellows in Mormon Studies and Gender

The University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies Program is pleased to award the Aileen H. and Hal M. Clyde Research Fellowship in Mormon Studies and Gender to the following recipients:

Cathy Gilmore
PhD Student, American History
University of Utah

In her project, “Family Imaginings: Scrapbooks and the Construction of Identity in Latter-day Saint Youth,” University of Utah PhD student Cathy Gilmore examines the twentieth-century practice of scrapbooking as a means of genealogical record-keeping for Latter-day Saint teens. Far more than just a hobby, Gilmore asserts that scrapbooking offered youth a means of reconciling their religious ancestry with contemporary ideals of gender and family in a more palatably American form than past Mormon theocracy and polygamy. Given the importance of genealogy in Latter-day Saint theology, these youth crafted their own unique expression of faith and identity through creative record-keeping. Gilmore’s project on scrapbooking informs her broader dissertation research of family history practices within Latter-day Saint institutions and family organizations.

In the Prince Collection, Gilmore hopes to study the genealogy-related church pamphlets and documents in the David O. McKay papers to understand how church programs studying genealogy shifted their approach throughout the twentieth century. Looking at more personal familial practices, Gilmore plans to analyze the Reed Smoot materials to understand how families memorialized their histories. And finally, the Clare Middlemiss and Beehive Girls scrapbooks in the collection offer primary resources for Gilmore’s research.

Elizabeth Alice Clement
Associate Professor of History
University of Utah

University of Utah Professor Elizabeth Alice Clement is a longtime scholar of gender and sexuality. In her upcoming book, The Reckoning: AIDS in Conservative America (University of North Carolina Press), she enters the field of Mormon Studies to analyze the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Utah. Continuing down this joint path of gender and Mormon studies, Professor Clement will visit the Prince Collection for research on two upcoming articles she is writing about homosexuality and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “‘What to Die From’: The Twin Epidemics of Suicide and AIDS Among LDS Men” analyzes the root causes of rising suicides among homosexual Mormons that preceded and later converged with the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. “‘Somehow to Blame’: Life and Faith Among the Wives of Same-Sex Attracted LDS Men” explores the shame and grief felt by the wives of homosexual men, who felt they had failed to make their families perfect by church and theological standards.

Professor Clement is interested in studying the Prince Collection’s national and Los Angeles chapter Affirmation newsletters to deepen understanding about the lives of homosexual men within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She also hopes to explore samplings of LGBT activist Carol Lynn Pearson’s unpublished work, pamphlets on homosexuality and the church, and newspaper clippings on related topics contained within the Prince Collection.

About the Fellowships

The Clyde fellowships are awarded for research in the Prince Collection on any topic related to Mormonism and gender.

The Prince Collection is composed of 108 cubic feet of published and unpublished materials, audio recordings, images and artifacts related to Mormonism in its several varieties, but primarily the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library which number more than 400,000 books, 15 million manuscripts, and thousands of maps, broadsides, photographs, audio and video recordings, and artifacts. It is nationally recognized for the richness of its holdings in American history.

A guide to the Collection, including a container inventory may be browsed online by entering the call number MSS 16540 in the UVA Library Search Engine.

Additionally, several diaries and excerpts from the Collection are free to browse on the UVA Mormon Studies Website.