Introducing the 2026 Clyde Research Fellow 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 Melodie Jackson, a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Maryland. Her dissertation, “‘Bread at My Table:’ Black Mormon Women, Food, Anti-Blackness, and Religious Belonging” examines how black Mormon women in Utah challenged Mormonism’s racial exclusions through food practices like domestic and agricultural labor, community gatherings, and church donations in the nineteenth century. Jackson argues that foodways were alternative sites of power, belonging, and meaning making amidst the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ priesthood and temple bans for black members.

In the Prince Collection, Jackson hopes to draw on sources like Brigham Young’s “The Nature of Man” to understand an early Mormon theology of the white body as sacred, regulated through diet, discipline, and labor as opposed to “cursed,” black bodies. She also wants to read several of historian Leonard J. Arrington’s writings on nineteenth century Latter-day Saint economics to contextualize how labor, gender, and food were structured in Mormon settlement communities as both economic and theological
systems. Finally, Jackson wants to analyze materials that address race, representation, and food, including Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s “Mormons and Negroes,” “The Negro in Mormon Theology,” the “Coon Chicken Inn” menu, the “Conservation Cook Book,” and Parley P. Pratt’s “Home Economy.”

About the Fellowships

The Clyde fellowship is 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The Prince Collection is composed of 108 cubic feet of published and unpublished materials, audio recordings, images and artifacts related to Mormonism in its several varieties, but primarily the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.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.