In a culminating keynote to a festschrift conference on March 15 honoring the work of Claudia Lauper Bushman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discussed the institutional and biographical contexts for Bushman’s career as a scholar of American history, including women’s social history and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bushman is Professor emerita of American Studies at Columbia University.

A panel discussion at the Tanner Humanities Center on March 4th featured authors of a new historical study that illuminates the complex debates around slavery and unfree labor in early Utah Territory. The conversation, featuring W. Paul Reeve, Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies and Chair of History at the University of Utah, and Christopher Rich, a PhD student and Army JAG Corps officer, was part of the Center’s renewed partnership with the Mormon Studies Initiative. As Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center, noted, “We understand the study of religions and faith traditions is an integral part of the humanities, because they are central to our lives, our history, and our culture.”

To a packed and enthusiastic auditorium at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on February 25, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong discussed the implications of becoming “bird curious.”