McMurrin lecture by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - Tanner Humanities Center

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “A Mormon Women Has Her Say”

The range of Claudia Bushman's written work is astonishing. From aphorisms to the documentary proceedings of the Delaware Assembly, she has illuminated unexplored corners of American experience. She has parsed the diaries of a Virginia farmer, a New England mill girl, and a grandmother named “Pansy,” and written dozens of articles and essays on American and Latter-day Saints culture and history. Her most recent book, I, Claudia, is both a personal memoir and a history of Mormon culture as it unfolded in urban centers outside the intermountain west.

Biography

Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor emerita at Harvard University. She is perhaps best known for A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Vintage, 1990). Her most recent book is A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and the Women’s Rights Movement, 1835-1870 (Knopf, 2017). Ulrich has served as the past president of the American Historical Association and also the Mormon History Association. Since retiring from teaching in 2018, she has lived in suburban Philadelphia.

Lecture chair: Amy Hoyt

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

The McMurrin lecture series was established in 1992 in honor of the late Sterling M. McMurrin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and former U.S. Commissioner of Education. It was Professor McMurrin’s hope to advance academic inquiry into the role of religion in people’s lives.

Sterling M. McMurrin’s long career—as teacher, scholar, administrator, and advisor to major national corporations, foundations, and federal agencies and as a perceptive observer of the human condition—is virtually unparalleled among the native sons and daughters of Utah. After earning his Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Utah, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California and was appointed to the faculty of the School of Philosophy. In 1948 he accepted a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.

Except for a two-year interval when he served as United States Commissioner of Education in the administration of President Kennedy, Sterling McMurrin devoted his professional life to the University of Utah, where he held faculty appointments in the Departments of Philosophy, History, and Educational Administration, and administrative appointments as Dean of the College of Letters and Science, Academic Vice President, Provost, Dean of the Graduate School, and founding member of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. He was the first person to be designated a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah and the first recipient of the University’s prestigious Rosenblatt Prize.

During his life Sterling M. McMurrin received numerous honorary degrees from universities and colleges across the nation, including an LL.D. awarded by the University of Utah in 1961. Dr. McMurrin lectured and wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of religion. He died in 1996.

The Sterling M. McMurrin Lectures in Religion and Culture were founded by Dr. McMurrin, Lowell M. Durham Jr. (Director of the Tanner Humanities Center from 1992 until his untimely death in September, 1997), and friends Richard Smoot, Peter Appleby, Jack Newell, Brigham Madsen, and Boyer Jarvis.

Claudia Lauper Bushman

This lecture is the culmination of A Festschrift for the 50th Anniversary of Mormon Sisters and the Pioneering Work of Claudia Lauper Bushman, sponsored by the Mormon Studies Initiative and the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center.

Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “A Mormon Women Has Her Say”

Biography