Quincy Newell
Walcott-Bartlett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Quincy D. Newell, a native Oregonian, studies American religious history, focusing on the construction of racial, gender, and religious identities in the nineteenth-century American West. Her first book examined the ways Native Americans around the San Francisco Bay adapted, adopted and rejected Catholicism during the Spanish colonial period. These days, Newell spends her time thinking and writing about nineteenth-century African American and Native American Mormons. In 2004 she took a job teaching at the University of Wyoming, where she was on the faculty for 11 years. Newell earned her bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and her master’s and doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Recent Courses Taught
Americanism, Ballots, and Consumption: The ABCs of American Religion
Religion in the American West
Imagining Religions
Seminar in American Religions: Mormonism in America and the World
Select Publications
Books:
- New Perspectives in Mormon Studies: Creating and Crossing Boundaries, essay collection edited with Eric F. Mason, University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.
- Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic Colonists, 1776- 1821, University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
Articles:
- "The Autobiography and Interview of Jane Elizabeth Manning James," Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 2 (2013), 252-91.
- "Religion and the American West," Religion Compass 6, no. 11 (20 12): 488-99.
- "Open Range Religion," Religion and Politics (29 June 2012).
- "Varieties of Religious Experience: Indians and Catholicism at Mission San Francisco de Asis, 1776- 1821," American Indian Quarterly 32, no. 4 (fall 2008), 412-42.
- '"The Indians Generally Love Their Wives and Children': Indian Marriage and Sexual Practices in Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara and San Jose," The Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 1 (January 2005), 60-82.
Book Chapters:
- "What Jane James Saw." In Directions for Mormon Studies in the 2151 Century, edited by Patrick Q. Mason. Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 2016.
- "Jane James's Agency." In Women and Mormonism: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Matthew Bowman and Kate Holbrook. Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, forthcoming.
- "Introduction" and '"Is There No Blessing for Me?' Jane James's Construction of Space in Latter-day Saint History and Practice." In New Perspectives in Mormon Studies: Creating and Crossing Boundaries, edited by Quincy D. Newell and Eric F. Mason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.
- "'Like Making Water Flow Uphill': Indian Labor and Indian Agency at Mission Dolores." In Mission San Francisco de Asis in the Ohlone Village of Chutchui: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the California Mission Studies Association, edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. Santa Clara, California: California Mission Studies Association, 2007.
- "'Impurity,' 'Unchastity,' 'Incontinence,' 'Lust,' and 'Fornication': Marriage, Sexuality, and Nineteenth-Century California Mission History." In Christianity and Native Cultures: Perspectives from Different Regions of the World, edited by Cyriac Pullapilly, Bernard J. Donahoe, C.S.C., David Stefancic and Bill Svellmoe. The Church and the World Series, vol. 13. Notre Dame, Indiana: Cross-Cultural Publications, 2004.
Encyclopedia Articles:
- "Frontier and Borderlands." In Encyclopedia of Religion in America, edited by Charles Lippy and Peter Williams. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010.
Professional Affiliations
American Academy of Religion
American Society of Church History
Mormon History Association
American Society for Ethnohistory
Western History Association
Appointed to the Faculty
2015Educational Background
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.A., Amherst College
