CALL FOR PAPERS

Submit by November 1, 2026

BREAKING BREAD: PEACE & CONFLICT

The Annual Meeting of

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities 
May 26-28, 2027  
Utah State University, Logan, Utah

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The Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) is delighted to announce its 20th-anniversary conference taking place May 2027 at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, on the theme of Breaking Bread: Peace & Conflict, with a submission deadline of November 1, 2026.

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The MSH Board invites interested conference attendees to join us in Cache Valley, at the northern edge of Utah, where the Wasatch Range breaks open onto some of the most productive farmland in the Intermountain West. Utah State University was founded in 1888 as the Agricultural College of Utah, the state’s land-grant institution under the Morrill Act — a school chartered, in other words, to teach a desert people how to grow, store, preserve, and distribute food. It has been making butter, cheese, and eventually its famous ice cream on campus since that first year. A conference on breaking bread could hardly ask for a more literal setting: a university built on the problem of the harvest, in a valley of dairies and creameries, on land taken from the people who had gathered, traded, and eaten there for centuries. 

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Logan sits roughly 85 miles north of Salt Lake City International Airport, which amounts to an 80-minute car ride or a 90-minute bus ride on the Salt Lake Express. The walkable campus offers plentiful lodging and dining options. Admitted participants will be invited to the event as an early summer retreat for revisiting bread and peace, humanities and humanity — Mormon, scholarly, and otherwise — together for the 20th anniversary of MSH. In addition to presentations, discussions, and shared meals, we will also “break bread” together by enjoying USU’s famous Aggie Creamery ice cream. 

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Hosted by Patrick Q. Mason, Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture and Director of the Religious Studies Program at USU, the MSH 2027 conference welcomes the broadest interpretation of “breaking bread” and of “peace and conflict” across the humanities disciplines: agriculture and environmental humanities, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, area studies, art, classics, comparative literature, dance, ethics, film studies, folklore, food studies, gender studies, history, Indigenous studies, languages, law and policy, linguistics, literature, media studies, musicology, peace and conflict studies, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, theater, theology, and many others. We also warmly welcome submissions of creative works, performances, and hands-on workshops.

The Board is also delighted to announce Professor Mason as the MSH 2027 keynote speaker. Author or editor of many books, including Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict (with J. David Pulsipher), Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion, and The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South, Mason has spent a career on the two faces of a single question: how religious communities make war, and how they might make peace. His keynote address is: “When Peace Becomes Conflict: Contemporary Latter-day Saint Contests Over What ‘Peacemaking’ Is and Means.”

The conference organizers follow Professor Mason in opening the theme of Breaking Bread: Peace & Conflict to broad and creative interpretation across the humanities.

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The conference welcomes papers, panels, and workshops of any serious nature. Possible paper topics and themes could include (but are in no way limited to) the following:

 

• Mormon foodways (e.g., funeral potatoes, casseroles, Jell-O); the recipe as archive; potlucks and other communal meals

• The sacrament as liturgy of reconciliation and as instrument of discipline

• Hospitality in scripture, literary tradition, or history

• Truth-and-reconciliation practice, restorative justice circles, or the ritual meals that conclude peace agreements

• The Word of Wisdom as a peace text; the intersection of dietary codes and folk belief

• Fast Sunday and hunger strikes, fast offerings

• Food storage, the year’s supply, home canning, the wheat grinder, and the edge where provident living meets prepper politics, bunkers, and millennial dread

• Latter-day Saint food media, homestead and “trad wife” content, MLM wellness and clean-eating economies

• “Breaking bread” in a pandemic: the kitchen sacrament, the temporary reconfiguration of priesthood and table, and what that episode revealed about where Latter-day Saint ritual lives

• Mormon anti-war movements or peacemaking efforts (scriptural, historical, or contemporary)

• The Bear River Massacre of 1863 and other broken treaties

• Indigenous food sovereignty, ecological restoration as reparation, and the land-grant university’s Morrill Act inheritance

• A poem, essay, recipe-sequence, or creative work on the shared table — the receipt book as literary form, food memoir, a table grace, or a performance built around a meal.

• Method and archive: what counts as a source in food studies? Cookbooks, ledgers, canning records, ward newsletters, menus, journals, and the systematic silence of those who cooked and did not write.

• Peacemaking in an age of polarization in literature, film, media, art, history, or scripture

 

A few ideas for practical case studies or workshops:

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• Cooking as scholarship: a hands-on reconstruction of a nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint or Shoshone dish from an archival source

• A guided session in the Fife Folklore Archives on foodways fieldwork method and the ethics of recording a family recipe 

• Panels on teaching peace and conflict at religious and land-grant institutions in a polarized moment, when both faith and the humanities are under strain.

• Creative and fresh poetic readings of all kinds.

• A collaboratively composed liturgy, table grace, or performance piece for a shared conference meal, written beforehand or assembled on site.

• Comments on food, agriculture, and meaning-making in an age of artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, vertical farming, and cultivated protein.
   

Interested scholars (rising, independent, affiliated), graduate students, and undergraduate students are invited to submit through the link below abstracts for papers as well as proposals for organized panels (250 words max), together with a bio (50 words max).

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Proposals received by November 1, 2026 will be fully considered. Notifications will be sent out no later than December 2026.

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Application instructions: Please complete the proposal form for the conference. All proposals will be reviewed by the review committee of the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. All presenters are required to register for the conference through MSH (fees will be set closer to the conference). No institutional or religious affiliations are required or assumed, although in practice many participants are also members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Graduate students wishing to be considered for a Graduate Student Travel Grant may indicate that in their online submission. Potential participants who know they can only participate remotely through a video call are required to declare so in their initial online submission so they can be considered among a very limited number of virtual presentations we anticipate; otherwise, since our community treasures in-person mentorship and networking, we do not plan to accommodate remote video requests after submission except in rare extenuating circumstances. Organizers aim to provide any on-site accommodations needed to participate fully and are happy to hear requests for accessibility, including dietary needs — which, this year, we take as a matter of theme as well as of hospitality. Information about the registration fee and available lodging will be posted on this site shortly.

 

Please submit proposals here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/83858/submitter