In Memoriam: Jan Shipps

A memorial letter from UVA’s Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies, Dr. Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Mormon Studies lost a brilliant collaborator and loyal friend on April 14. Jan Shipps was a scholar of Mormon traditions, a delightful raconteur, and an even-handed critic. Many of her friends in the LDS Church have written and spoken about what she, as a lifelong Methodist, meant to the community of LDS members and leaders. The Salt Lake Tribune posted an excellent obituary that is worth reading.

Here, I want to reflect briefly on what she meant to many of us outside the fold of the Saints, but who consider ourselves sympathetic scholarly companions. As a graduate student in the 1980s, I studied religion in the nineteenth-century American West. But I had studiously avoided research on the Mormons—not out of any animosity, but out of an interest in highlighting that Mormons were not the only religious people to venture west of the Mississippi River. Jan, who had just published her groundbreaking study Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (1985), had that field covered.

Or so I thought. Jan came to me some years later and said, in her straightforward way, “I think you should study the Mormons.” I protested about why I thought it was important to do a few other things, but she was unrelenting. Thinking I might halt her persistent nudging, I agreed to give an address at the Mormon History Association in 1999, and taught a seminar the prior term on Mormonism in the U.S. After that, I was hooked.

I wasn’t alone. Increasingly, other non-members developed their own interests in the tradition,
and the field grew from a niche operation staffed mostly by faithful believers (with Jan as
cheerleader) into a thriving arena of interest for all sorts of scholars. In this sense, Mormon
Studies became “mainstream” in religious studies, history, literature and other academic
disciplines. Endowed chairs of Mormon Studies, including ours here at UVA, resulted from this
burgeoning interest.

Jan wasn’t the only force behind these changes, of course. But, she was certainly the champion
and the most energetic gatherer of intellectual colleagues. It was hard to say no to Jan. She could
talk to church leaders just as easily as to academic colleagues. She brought people together
without mincing words (and her words were chosen carefully, as any reader of her prose knows).
The field of Mormon Studies would not be the same without Jan’s leadership. We honor her and
will miss her.