Contributors

CHRISTINE COOPER-ROMPATO is an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, where she teaches medieval literature. Her medieval research focuses on fourteenthand fifteenth-century English devotional and visionary texts, as well as vernacular and Latin sermons. She is also deeply interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in areas including religion, gender, science, and technology. Cooper-Rompato has written several essays, both published and forthcoming, about early African American mathematicians.

MADISON S. HARRIS is a Kane Scholar and member of the Chancellor’s Leadership Class at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where she double majors in history and biology. Her paper “A Cloud of Controversy: George Washington and Smallpox Inoculation during the American Revolution” won the best paper award at the annual Phi Alpha Theta Conference in Colorado and was subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal. She has presented her research at the John Whitmer Historical Association Conference, as well as local and regional conferences. She plans to attend medical school in 2021.

MATTHEW L. HARRIS is Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he teaches and writes on religion and politics, American religious history, and civil rights. He received a BA and an MA from Brigham Young University and an MPhil and PhD from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of numerous works, including The Mormon Church and Blacks (2015), Thunder from the Right (2019), and “Watchman on the Tower” (2020). He is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled “The Long-Awaited Day: Blacks, Mormons, and the Lifting of the Priesthood and Temple Ban, 1907–2019.”

JESSICA MARIE NELSON received a BA in American studies from Brigham Young University and an MS in history from Utah State University. As a graduate student at USU, she held the Milner/Butler editorial fellowship for Western Historical Quarterly. Her master’s thesis, “‘The Mississippi of the West’: Religion, Conservatism, and Racial Politics in Utah, 1960–1978,” was awarded the best master’s thesis by the Mormon History Association in 2018.

CONNELL O’DONOVAN is a historian, biographer, and professional genealogist. In 1988, he gave his first presentation on Gay and Lesbian Mormon history at Affirmation’s conference in Los Angeles. A year later, he became the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Utah. He has also taught courses on Queer history at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco. He currently serves as chair of the education committee of the Utah Queer Historical Society, a project of the Utah Pride Center.

GREGORY E. SMOAK is director of the American West Center and Associate Professor of History at University of Utah, where he specializes in American Indian, American western, environmental, and public history. His association with the American West Center spans three decades and has included projects with Native peoples in Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and California. He currently serves as vice president of the National Council on Public History.