CULTIVATING MORMON LITERATURE & OTHER GARDENS
The Annual Meeting of
Mormon Scholars in the Humanities
& Association for Mormon Letters
May 28-30, 2025
Snow College
Ephraim, Utah
Submit here by October 15, 2024
The Association for Mormon Letters (AML) and Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) are delighted to announce a joint May 2025 conference at Snow College on the theme of Cultivating Mormon Literature & Other Gardens with a submission deadline of October 15, 2024.
The AML and MSH Boards invite interested conference attendees to join us at the beautiful Snow College campus in Ephraim, Utah, literally seventeen minutes from the geographic exact center of Utah, a short seventy-five minutes south of Provo (with carpooling in the works), just north of the historic Manti temple, one block from the Ephraim Heritage Museum, and walkable to a number of modest restaurants and an affordable conference hotel. In addition to the annual cream soda social at the host’s home, admitted conference participants will be invited to constitute a summer retreat to reflect and do the spadework of cultivating literature—Mormon, scholarly, and otherwise—together.
The AML and MSH Boards are also delighted to announce Michael Austin as the AML-MSH 2025 keynote speaker. Michael Austin, author and editor of many books, provost and conference host at Snow College, will speak on the question of Mormon literature: specifically, how does one cultivate Mormon literature? What is Mormon literature? Might it be, as previous critics have suggested, a garden? Under what cultural, institutional, and other conditions does Mormon literature grow toward harvest, wither, hibernate, or molt?
More generally, how can we (mis)understand the spadework of any humanistic tradition as the cultivation of a garden—an often messy, weedy, sweaty site for the social construction and natural growth of the sweet fruits, higher arts, and nourishing produce of words? How does one think about the ecological and environmental forking pathways irrigating and flowering any lettered tradition? What are the institutional and cultural difficulties of creating an arts and letters tradition? How, if at all, should one garden Mormon literature from the center of a once-and-future desert landscape? How does the word become living—and where do ecological and gardening metaphors fall short, and why? If the word is art, how, if at all, might artifice also live?
Austin will discuss the question of Mormon literature—and in particular what it means to get about the spadework of building a distinctly Mormon tradition. We understand the spirit of his inquiry to be a paraphrase of American composer Cole Porter: “If you want a future, darling, why don’t you get a past?” Namely, what is Mormon literature—or what was it? Is there one today? Should there be? What about these examples?
Possible paper topics and themes could include (but are in no way limited to) the following:
- A Mormon critical analysis of non-Mormon titles or vice versa (could be historical or contemporary novels, poetry, films, TV shows, or other media);
- A textual analysis or history of a Mormon-authored text, past or present (e.g., tracing its public or critical reception, situating its place in the canon, or analyzing its historical construction through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, or class);
- A reflection on the states of Mormon literature, broadly read: What institutional and cultural spadework precedes the cultivation of any ethnic or religious canon?
- Mormon canon formation, the (Mexico-American) can(n)on wars, historiography, and history-making;
- With a bookmark in the Frankfurt school (cf. Adorno in 106 here) and a foot in the Beehive State, when does an archive become a living “(arc)hive” (or the art collective the Arch-hive)?
- A critique of gardening, ecological, and environmental literary vocabularies: Why might, say, the language of (Kolakowski on) not-gardening or inorganic metaphors be a more useful framework?
- Transamerican or transnational comparisons on the many curious partial simulations of Borges’s total library;
- A feminist ecocritique of Marie de France and national nomenclatures across the environmental humanities;
- With a nod to Raymond Williams’ keyword essay on “culture,” an essay on how literary traditions unearth the deep roots of emerging religions (cults), education (cultivation), and agriculture behind the construction of culture?
- A semiotic (perhaps even prophetic) deconstruction of the category of Mormon and other ethnic, cultural terms;
- With a nod to the conference location, commentary on settler colonialism, agriculture, ranching, pollution, and theologies of material agency beyond Turner’s frontier thesis;
- Archival erasure, citational politics, and acts of silence;
- A poem or creative work on the extra-historical meaning of organic record growth, whether journals, social media, family history, and mountainous archives: who speaks on behalf of archival collective action at a distance beyond Borges, Foucault, and the Granite Mountain Records Vault?
- How might citational practices be critically rethought, in or beyond Mormon literary culture (talks, poems, videos), as a kind of proxy borrowing and reclaiming of other sources? How, if at all, might any religious-literary tradition be open-source?
- An essay on “making up” literature, with a nod to the dynamic nominalism in Hacking’s “Making Up People” on the nineteenth-century construction of queerness;
- An eco-theological exegesis of Joseph Smith in D&C 128, or other literary figures, on how records ground the heavens to earth(l)y books, trees, and the soil; or
- A new hymn or liturgy, composed by a panel of artists and critics either beforehand or collaboratively at the conference.
A few practical case studies and workshops:
- Workshops on best practices for sustaining professions around Mormon literature in and beyond the American West;
- Explorations of the role of womens’ voices in oral history and education, journaling and family history, culture and agriculture;
- Panels on the commercial, social, cultural, and other challenges to producing Mormon and non-Mormon texts, art, and expression;
- Other comments on the social construction of the lettered arts in an age of AI.
Gardens of literature and other words also invite reflections on who gardens and whose works are tended to? Who writes, who reads, who archives, who indexes, who counts, and under whose terms? How do the evolving fields of gender, race, class, and other ways of being express themselves as individuals and communities in the construction of literary legacies? How do these terms of identity express themselves to cultivators such as archivists, chroniclers, scribes, recordkeepers, preservationists, curators, librarians, and catalogers? How do variously gendered, sexually oriented, racial, abled and disabled, neurodiverse, and otherwise diversely divine bodies in concert with one another ground and reproduce, challenge and enrich our readings and making up of literatures and their archives?
With this introduction the conference topic of Cultivating Mormon Literature & Other Gardens, the AML and MSH Boards also welcome the many other gardens at work in the humanities, inviting papers and panels framed beyond the conference theme. We stress that all serious expressions of interest in the humanities, broadly read, are welcomed, especially those that serve one’s current professional research interests or pedagogy in the humanities. We welcome special paper and panel proposals that focus on humanistic scholarship with or across any restorationist impulse.
Interested scholars (rising, independent, affiliated), graduate students, and students are invited to submit through the link below abstracts for papers as well as proposals for organized panels (250 words max), together with a bio (50 words max).
Proposals received by October 15 will be fully considered.
Notifications will be sent out no later than November 15.
Application instructions: There is only one proposal form for this conference. Each applicant will be required to specify in their initial application whether they want their application to be reviewed by the review committees in the Association for Mormon Letters or Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. The two boards will then meet separately to review only the submissions directed to them and make their acceptance decisions separately. All presenters are required to register for the conference through MSH (fees will be distributed later appropriately). No institutional or religious affiliations are assumed, although in practice many participants are also members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Graduate students wishing to be considered for a Graduate Student Travel Grant may indicate that in their online submission. Potential participants who know they can only participate remotely through a video call are required to declare this in their initial online submission. Since our community treasures the mentorship and networking of in-person gatherings, we do not plan to accommodate remote video requests after submission except in rare extenuating circumstances. Information about the registration fee and available accommodation will be posted soon at https://mormonscholars.net and https://www.associationmormonletters.org/.
Please submit proposals here: https://forms.gle/PxYT2A2b4c5pvdKW9
Please direct questions to MSH President Benjamin Peters bjpeters@gmail.com with MSH Secretary Nicole Issac on cc: nicole24issac@gmail.com and the MSH general email on cc: admin@mormonscholars.net. Questions about AML may also be sent directly to aml.mormonletters@gmail.com and Jessie_Christensen@byu.edu