Since last July, Associate Professor of Religious Studies Quincy Newell has lectured and been interviewed several times about her book, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. Published last spring by Oxford University Press, the scholarly biography tells the story of a black woman from Connecticut who converted to Mormonism in the 1840s and became a central figure in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In October, Newell presented “Afflicting the Comfortable: Jane James, American Racism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. A recording of the same lecture, presented in November for The Miller Eccles Study Group, was featured as a Dialogue Lectures podcast in January.
An article titled “Biography reveals little-known details from the life of Jane Manning James” was published in the Deseret News (Salt Lake City) in July. It was based on an email interview with Kurt Manwaring following the publication of Your Sister in the Gospel.
Newell’s interview with Rick Bennett about Your Sister in the Gospel was presented in five parts on the Gospel Tangents podcast. The series started with “Was Jane a Slave?” Subsequent topics were “19th Century Sexual Politics,” “Jane’s One-of-a-Kind Sealing to Joseph Smith,” “Jane Manning James’ Pioneer Life in Utah,” and finally, “Does Mormonism Have Racist Theology?”
