OUP has a 30% sale going on right now, so I'm looking around for something economical to waste my money on, and I meet a host of Mormon books. More than a few times on Podcasts I have heard Mormon books introduced by fawning about about the fact that they are published by Oxford. It's taken as a sign by both liberal and conservative Mormons alike that, at last, Mormonism is getting the respectability it deserves.
All the well known ones of recent years are here up for sale: Givens (even a completely unneeded 2nd edition of "Vipers on the Hearth"), Walker & Co. on Mountain Meadows, Sam Brown (I ask you, in what other field besides medicine would OUP even consider a manuscript from some doctor with no presence in that field but just decided the write the book in his spare time?), "The Mormon Menace," etc.
Get 'em while they're hot.
Forthcoming: "Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings." Contributors/editors include such important and weighty scholars as Joanna Brooks, who wrote a memoir and got some media attention, and Hannah Wheelwright, who blogs and just finished her undergraduate degree.
Forthcoming: "The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism" ($105 on sale, $150 when it's published). O. M. F. G. Well, I tell myself, at least they didn't call it the "Oxford Handbook of Mormon Studies." It "Offers the first comprehensive overview of the field of Mormon studies"..."Provides cutting edge scholarship on the global expansion of Mormonism"..."Brings together 45 of the top scholars in the field of Mormonism studies"...
Forthcoming: "Catholic and Mormon, A Theological Conversation." To entice you, OUP tells us that it's "The first book to bring these traditions together in an effort to trace their similarities and differences; Timely and relevant, given the increasing media attention on tensions between the two churches due to Mormon expansion and growth in traditionally Catholic areas; Authors are both converts to their respective traditions."
And there are many more titles in Mormonism, but almost all of them seem irrelevant outside of people who are already interested in Mormonism, namely Mormons. What about other academic academic publishing outfits? Not just the standards for Mormon stuff (Illinois, which published a lot on U.S. religious history, Utah State, University of Utah, BYU, and of course the Maxwell Institute, all of whose connections to Mormonism are obvious).
Cambridge: just three Mormon books, one an introduction (which I have read and which is intended for non-Mormon academics of religion), another an edited collection about Mormonism and politics (that seems like it could interest non-Mormons), and John Brooks's "Refiner's Fire."
Harvard: Turner's Brigham Young biography, obviously of interest to non-Mormons working on US history, western history, US religious history, or 19th century expansionism etc.
Yale: "Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859" (maybe of interest to historians of the US west?) and Skousen's Book of Mormon (I confess I have no idea who but Mormons would care about this).
None of these have anything like the proliferation of Mormon-themed books at Oxford University Press (or, as an older generation of Mormons might have called it, "the Oxford University Press"
). And the few books they do have look like they might have wider application. But just consider some of the selling-points of these forthcoming titles at OUP: Has Mormon feminism really reached the point where it interests feminists outside of Mormonism at all? Are there even more than 45 scholars (e.g. employed academics whose primary research topic is Mormonism) in Mormon studies? Global expansion? Why is there no "Oxford Handbook of Pentacostalism," which is exponentially larger than Mormonism and far more influential on the global stage? And, Alonzo Gaskill, are you f***ing kidding me?!? This is someone who—and I say this as someone who saw him brag about this while I was a student of his—doesn't understand that teaching at Stanford and teaching at the LDS Institute in the vicinity of Stanford are different things.
So, my question, who is agent/agents at OUP who is/are soliciting/accepting all of these Mormon-themed books? Is s/he Mormon? Or, are they just really savvy? Because the fact is, Mormon studies is really a hobbyist enterprise for the most part, and it will probably never gain the wide academic relevance that some of the younger scholars hope for—yet one more reason that maintaining control of the Maxwell Institute is so important—and although it was briefly modish, it is not an accident that its brief flowering coincided with the rise of Mitt Romney, who has thankfully exited right from the stage (despite the insistence of his conservative detractors that he exited left). Yet, OUP has dozens and dozens of Mormon-themed books which seem to have academic relevance only to people already interested in Mormoniana. Unfortunately, since there really isn't much of a presence of "Mormon Studies" in academia more broadly, that means mostly non-academics. OUP hit a goldmine with a captive market of Mormon intellectual-types starved for a sense of respectability and something more interesting than the GA drivel that Desert Book peddles.
(insert sound of cash registers: ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching $ $ $ $ $)
