Matthew Bowman was appointed the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, with a joint appointment in history and religion in 2019. He is a specialist in American religious history, with particular interests in Mormonism, new religious movements, and the development of the concept of “religion” in the United States. He teaches courses on North American religions and Mormonism in the department of religion, and on the history of the United States in the department of history.
Prior to his arrival at CGU, Bowman held positions at Hampden-Sydney College and Henderson State University. He received his PhD from Georgetown University in 2011, and has regularly appeared in the national media to comment on Mormonism and American religion. He has written for the Washington Post, Slate, The New Republic, and the Huffington Post, and has appeared on MSNBC and NPR.
He is the author or co-editor of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012), Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (University of Utah, 2016), and most recently Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). He is currently serving as co-editor of the University of Illinois Press series Introductions to Mormon Thought, and is working on a book length study of the mid-twentieth century correlation movement in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Christian: The Politics of a Word in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Co-editor. Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016.
The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. New York: Random House, 2012.
“Toward a Catholic History of Mormonism.” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 1 (2015): 198-217.
“Matthew Philip Gill and Joseph Smith: The Dynamics of Mormon Schism.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 14, no. 3 (2011): 42-63.
“The Crisis of Mormon Christology: History, Progress, and Protestantism, 1880-1930.” Fides et Historia 40, no. 2 (2008): 1-27.