Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Fruits Of Our Labor: Exploring The Impacts Of A Nonprofit Seed Bank On Indigenous Communities In The Southwestern United States, Rachel Mary Davis

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways that the nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH, of Tucson, Arizona interfaces with Indigenous communities and the local seed and food systems in the Southwest United States. The thesis argues that Native seed and food sovereignty have different meanings for different Indigenous people, and that nonprofits working with Indigenous communities need to consider input from them when deciding how to catalogue, regenerate and sustain healthy grow outs for the future, especially in the light of climate change and drought.

The Velvet Ditch, Kate Leslie

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

At the party house, the door is always open.

Fiona finds herself living in her hometown after graduating from college. So she spends her weekends like everyone else: attending late night house parties after all the bars shut down. But no matter how much fun each party might be, Fiona eventually must face her past and her future.

A play about nostalgia and what it feels like to be lost.

The Kids Are Driving The Bus, Kristin Lundberg

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

A full-length play with elements of music and audience participation. Ms. McShizzle has to decide how far she will go to challenge the educational system and empower her students to pursue their dreams. When confronting her nemesis, an audacious Clown with a harmful neurosis, McShizzle struggles to build the school community for good.

The Sun, The Moon, And The Truth, Sarah Cosgrove Gaumond

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

The Sun, The Moon, and The Truth is a collection of two plays: North Wind and I Lived To Tell. Both plays explore the human condition through differing lenses.

In North Wind, a play deeply rooted in magical realism, a trio of characters search for freedom from the past in a snow-bound Midwestern bar. The dramatic question of North Wind is: How do you move forward when everything you see reminds you of what you’ve lost?

I Lived To Tell, a non-linear play, takes place in the character's imagination. The play's dramatic question is: How does a …

Queer Survival Amidst Hiv/Aids, Covid-19 And Homelessness, Julia Young

Pitzer Senior Theses

The treatment and survival of a society's marginalized peoples reveal the true impacts of a pandemic. An analysis of homeless queer youth during the HIV/AIDS and SARS-CoV-2 crises lays bare the systemic failure of the United States government to provide equitable healthcare.

I compare the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics in queer homeless youth to demonstrate the dangers of disease moralization via a sociocultural analyses of disease stigma and responsibility politics. Utilizing syndemic theory I draw on the synergistic relationship between disease and illness to describe the unique challenges queer homeless youth face. A syndemic framework is applied to address common …

The Heirloom As Evidence: Investigating The Colonial Trace Preserved Within My Family’S Sandalwood Box, Olivia Meehan

Pitzer Senior Theses

This paper accompanies my senior art exhibition Picturing the Colonial Trace. Pulling from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars, I theorize the practice of critical white auto-ethnography through visual interrogations of family heirlooms. The heirloom as evidence holds within its form a colonial trace. I investigate this trace through my creative practice, revealing the environmental, economic, and interpersonal histories of the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. My art disrupts my family’s narrative of a benevolent British Empire and redirects attention to the silences of my family archive. This thesis proposes a potential model for white scholars of Environmental …

Rhetorical Criticism Of Trevor, Alexis Johnson

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

Released in 1994, the short film, Trevor, shares the story of a 13-year-old boy as he navigates the complexities of sexual orientation in America. Written by James Lecesne, the short film incorporates his personal experiences with growing up as a queer individual in the LGBTQ+ community and the socio-political concerns of rising suicide rates of LGBTQ+ youth. Throughout the film, Trevor must traverse the intricacies of sexual orientation in 1981, while facing a lack of support from his parents, and harsh criticism from his friends and peers. Trevor, as a rhetorical act, holds great significance in the United States with …

A Point Of Honor: Drengskapr In Þorsteins Þáttr Stangarhǫggs, Noah R. Mincheff

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

Þorsteins þáttr Stangarhǫggs, or “The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Struck” is an atypical piece of Norse short prose that likely originates from a mid-13th century oral tradition.1 Although the tale employs many of the common saga motifs, such as elaborate genealogies, and the plain prose of the genre, this perceived simplicity and objectivity is deceptive. Early 20th century scholars in particular, such as Vilhelm Grønbech, in their efforts to define the essence of the Icelandic Sagas, rightly identify numerous key themes in Icelandic literature but fail to acknowledge those themes as anything more than “aesthetic indulgence”.2 Such themes as honor, fate, …

In Memoriam, Orrin Glenn Hatch (1934-2022)

BYU Studies

At the passing of Senator Orrin G. Hatch on April 23, 2022, BYU Studies joins in honoring this outstanding public servant, who has been called “the most important Utah politician since Brigham Young.” Senator Hatch served seven terms in the United States Senate (1977 to 2019), the longest period in office of any Republican. During his tenure, he presided over three major Senate committees: Labor and Human Resources, Judiciary, and Finance. In 2017, he also was elected to the position of president pro tempore of the Senate.

Gold, Silver, And Grain, Shinji Takagi

BYU Studies

In this paper, I discuss, from the perspective of a monetary economist, the operational aspects of the system of fixed prices for gold, silver, and all kinds of grain described in the Book of Mormon (Alma 11:3–19), based on internal evidence, economic logic, and historical precedents from antiquity. Previous authors have noted several unique features of the Nephite system, which was purportedly created by king Mosiah in the early first century BC. For example, John Welch, approaching the system strictly as one of weights and measures, argued that, in this otherwise binary system (in which denomination increases by a multiple …

Oracles Of God, Ryan S. Gardner

BYU Studies

When President Russell M. Nelson read the “Restoration of the Fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: A Bicentennial Proclamation” at the 190th annual general conference on April 5, 2020, several articles appeared explaining this newest proclamation in the context of its predecessors. These articles revealed that these historically and spiritually valuable documents were not readily accessible in a single digital repository.

Covenant Language In Biblical Religions And The Book Of Mormon, Noel B. Reynolds

BYU Studies

Because twenty-first-century public discourse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to feature the language of covenant more and more often, it may be helpful to step back and reexamine the scriptural and historical backgrounds for covenant theology and terminology. When the Restoration took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was dependent primarily on the language of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible and contemporary Protestant teachings for a context in which to interpret the language of Joseph Smith’s revelations and the Book of Mormon. After two centuries of modern linguistic …

Sally In Three Worlds: An Indian Captive In The House Of Brigham Young, By Virginia Kerns (Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2021), Julia Harrison

BYU Studies

In Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young, Virginia Kerns relates the story of the settlement of Utah through the life of Sally, a Pahvant Ute woman who lived in Brigham Young’s household. On its surface, the book is a narrative of the life of one woman, but Kerns argues that “a single life can illuminate an entire cultural and social world, or reveal an unremarked but vital part of the human story.”

A New Witness To The World, By Robert A. Rees (Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2020), Lane Welch

BYU Studies

This book provides a series of essays that analyze and contextualize the text of the Book of Mormon while providing Professor Rees’s faithful perspective on the text. Though each essay stands on its own as a separate work, the later essays, handling the context of Joseph Smith’s work as a nineteenth-century American writer, do reference and build off one another. These later essays handle the backgrounds and processes of various American writers contemporary to Joseph Smith, providing an effective survey of the literary milieu into which the Book of Mormon first entered; the earlier essays are more focused on the …

An Experiential Pathway To Conversion, Robert K. Christensen, Matthew D. Wride, Neil R. Lundberg

BYU Studies

Joseph Smith’s formal education did not extend beyond the third grade. His life did not extend beyond the final years of his thirties. The person he became and his work in restoring the gospel of Jesus Christ, however, extend into eternity. John Taylor observed that “Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it.”

Sacred Space, Jacqueline Price

BYU Studies

My painting is about how an ordinary space can be made sacred when we invite the heavenly and earthly realms to align more closely. As a young woman reading her scriptures looks up towards heaven for inspiration, light and the Spirit of God fall upon her, and a connection is made.

Gethsemane, Darlene Young

BYU Studies

I want to tell the story. But— there is no approaching this, strange crux of everything.

Holy Places, Merrijane Rice

BYU Studies

I watch the sunset from the corner of Country Mill and Western Drive and note how rooflines echo Frary Peak on Antelope Island—bent pyramids black against the sky and rimmed with light like glowing magma.

Seeing, Dave Nielsen

BYU Studies

Grandpa Lewis is losing his sight. None of us knows what he can or can’t see.

Terrible Revolution: Latter-Day Saints And The American Apocalypse By Christopher James Blythe, Tona Hangen

BYU Studies

When a costume-clad man wielded a Captain Moroni “title of liberty” flag at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, it was a notable reminder that revolutionary end-times ideology has a long and evocative presence in the culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and adjacent religions. Christopher Blythe’s timely and wide-ranging book explores these themes across time, geography, and even denominational boundaries. He defines apocalypticism both as a distinct Jewish- Christian scriptural literary form found in Hebrew and Christian texts and malleable perfectionist ideology embracing “catastrophic millennialism,” to borrow Catherine Wessinger’s coinage. In brief, apocalyptic rhetoric …

Joseph Smith For President: The Prophet, The Assassins, And The Fight For American Religious Freedom By Spender Mcbride, Jordan T. Watkins

BYU Studies

In Joseph Smith for President, Spencer McBride provides an illuminating and reader-friendly account of Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign. McBride, who is a scholar of American religious and political history and an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, firmly situates the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within antebellum contexts. In doing so, he contributes to a body of scholarship that examines the early Saints’ experiences in ways that shed light on and correct assumptions about American historical developments. In one recent example, which addresses some of the same themes, Benjamin E. …

Mormon Studies: A Critical History By Ronald Helfrich Jr., Roger Terry

BYU Studies

This short but dense critical history of Mormon studies is unique in several ways. First, author Ronald Helfrich Jr. is a self-described “Gentile” scholar who spent “probably far too many years,” including a year as a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University, researching and writing this history. Second, the book is surprisingly thorough. I have been the editorial director at BYU Studies for the past sixteen years and thought I had a fairly decent grasp of Mormon studies, past and present, but Helfrich repeatedly describes the work of historians and other scholars with whom I …

End Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

How Did Joseph Smith Translate The Book Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Multiple sources associated with the coming forth of the Book of Abraham spoke of Joseph Smith “translating” the text from the papyri he acquired. The Prophet himself used this language to describe his own activity with the text. For example, an entry in his journal under the date November 19, 1835, indicates the Prophet “spent the day in translating” the Egyptian records. In an unpublished editorial that was apparently meant to be printed in the March 1, 1842, issue of the Times and Seasons (the issue that saw the publication of the first installment of the Book of Abraham), Joseph …

Abraham And Idrimi, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

The Book of Abraham narrates the life of the biblical patriarch in a first-person autobiographical voice. The book begins: “In the land of the Chaldeans, at the residence of my fathers, I, Abraham, saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence” (Abr. 1:1). This first-person voice continues throughout the text as if Abraham himself was writing.

The Blood Of The Canaanites, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

The first chapter of the Book of Abraham contains a short detail about the ancestry of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt: “Now this king of Egypt was a descendant from the loins of Ham, and was a partaker of the blood of the Canaanites by birth. From this descent sprang all the Egyptians, and thus the blood of the Canaanites was preserved in the land” (Abr. 1:21–22). Although he was a righteous man who “judged his people wisely and justly all his days” (v. 26), Pharaoh could not lay claim to any priesthood authority because of his ancestry (v. 27). …

Zeptah And Egyptes, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

The Book of Abraham describes how “the land of Egypt [was] first discovered by a woman, who was the daughter of Ham, and the daughter of Egyptus” (Abr. 1:23). This woman “discovered the land [when] it was under water, who afterward settled her sons in it; and thus, from Ham, sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land.” Thereafter “the first government of Egypt was established by Pharaoh, the eldest son of Egyptus, the daughter of Ham” (vv. 24–25).

The Name Of The Lord, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

On two occasions in the Book of Abraham, the Lord reveals to Abraham his true name: Jehovah. The first incident was when Abraham had a “vision of the Almighty,” wherein “the angel of [the Lord’s] presence” rescued him from being sacrificed in Ur of the Chaldees and made early allusions to a future covenant relationship (Abr. 1:15). “And his voice was unto me: Abraham, Abraham, behold, my name is Jehovah, and I have heard thee, and have come down to deliver thee, and to take thee away from thy father’s house, and from all thy kinsfolk, into a strange …

Kolob, The Governing One, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

One of the more memorable contributions of the Book of Abraham is its depiction of Kolob (Abr. 3:3–4, 9, 16; Facsimile 2, fig. 1). According to the Book of Abraham, Kolob is characterized by the following.