Colby Townsend, a dual Ph.D. student in Religious Studies and English, has just had his essay, “Secret Societies and the Political Context of Joseph Smith’s Rewritten Scripture,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (University of Illinois Press). In the article, Townsend seeks to expand the scope for early Mormon studies out from the local political issues of anti-Masonry occurring in New York in the 1820s to the larger political discourse on revolution and secret societies in the transatlantic world from the French Revolution to the late 1820s, particularly as anti-Enlightenment theorists wrote against the revolution and the Jacobins. Townsend shows how closely related the ideas and concerns found in The Book of Mormon (1830) are with anti-Jacobin literature of the age of revolutions.
The College of Arts