Mormon Studies Faculty

Richard Bushman, Howard W. Hunter Professor of Mormon Studies

Richard Bushman received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University, the University of Delaware, and retired as Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University before taking his position at Claremont.  He has worked broadly in the field of American social and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  His published works include:

  • From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765, Recipient of the Bancroft Prize.
  • The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740-1745
  • Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, Recipient of the Evans Prize
  • King and People in Provincial Massachusetts
  • The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
  • Building the Kingdom of God, with Claudia Bushman
  • Believing History: Latter-day Saint Essays
  • Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Recipient of the Evans Prize and the Mormon History Association Best Book Award

At Claremont he teaches an introduction to Religion in America from contact to the Civil War; the Life and Thought of Joseph Smith; American Religion in the Time of Joseph Smith; the Mormon Theological Tradition; and “Other” Religions in America. Professor Bushman is currently working on a study of Mormon apologetics.

Claudia Bushman, Adjunct Faculty Member

Claudia Bushman studied at Wellesley College before receiving her Ph.D. in New England and American Studies at Boston University.  She has taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University, the University of Delaware, and Columbia University, and is now adjunct professor in the School of Religion at Claremont.  Among her published works are:

  • Mormon Sisters:  Women in Early Utah
  • "A Good Poor Man's Wife: Being the Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England
  • America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero
  • In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Antebellum Journal of John Walker
  • Building the Kingdom of God, with Richard Bushman
  • Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America

She has recently edited the autobiography of a frontier Mormon woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Her courses at Claremont include Mormonism through Women’s Eyes; Contemporary Mormonism; Religion in American Women’s Autobiographies; Contemporary Religion in Southern California; and Race and Gender in Mormonism (with Armand Mauss).

Armand L. Mauss, Adjunct Faculty Member

Armand L. Mauss received his M. A. in History (1957) and his Ph.D. in Sociology (1970) at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1962-69, he taught history and sociology at community colleges in California and at Utah State University. In 1999, after 30 years at Washington State University, he retired as Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Religious Studies. During his career, he also had short-term visiting faculty appointments in Canada, in the UK, and at UC-Santa Barbara. He is a former editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and a past president of the Mormon History Association. His published articles and books have focused mainly on the sociology of religion and on social movements, including new religious movements. His published books include :

  • All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage, Received Mormon History Association annual prize
  • The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, Received MHA annual prize
  • Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Encounter the Race Issue in a UniversalChurch, with Lester E. Bush, Jr.
  • This Land of Promises: The Rise and Fall of Social Problems in America, edited with J. C. Wolfe.
  • Social Problems as Social Movements

At Claremont, Mauss has been a visiting scholar since 2004 and teaches courses in the history and the sociology of the Mormons. His most recent work compares the Mormon experience in Europe with that in North America.