Associate Professor of Religious Studies Quincy Newell recently presented “‘I Am White with the Exception of the Color of My Skin’: ‘Aunt’ Jane James and the Paradox of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Mormonism” during the 53rd annual conference of the Mormon History Association (MHA). The meeting, with the theme “Homelands and Bordered Lands,” took place in Boise, Idaho, June 7 to 10.
Newell studies American religious history. Her recent work has focused on 19th-century African American and Native American Mormons.
She has written extensively about Jane Elizabeth Manning James, an African American woman from Connecticut who converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s. Newell published Narrating Jane: Telling the Story of an Early African American Mormon Woman, based on a 2015 lecture by the same name, as well as several articles about James.
Newell is currently working on a book titled Marginal Mormons: African Americans and Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her project is supported by a grant from the Louisville Institute.
