Howard W. Hunter Chair - Claremont Mormon Studies

Matthew Bowman was appointed the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, with a joint appointment in history and religion in 2019. Professor Bowman 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.

Former Howard W. Hunter Chairs of Mormon Studies

Patrick Mason held the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies from 2011-2019. He earned his BA from Brigham Young University, and graduate degrees including an MA in International Peace Studies and PhD in American history from the University of Notre Dame. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011); Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century (University of Utah Press, 2016); Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945 (co-edited with John Turner; Oxford University Press, 2016); What Is Mormonism? A Student’s Introduction (Routledge, 2017); and Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

During his time at CGU, Professor Mason also served several years as chair of the Religion Department, and from 2016-2019 as Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. He currently holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University.

Richard Lyman Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University in New York City. Educated at Harvard College, he earned an A.M. in history and a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. From 2008-2011, he was visiting Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His first book, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690‑1765 (1967), was awarded the Bancroft Prize. He has also published Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984), King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985); The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992); Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005); and The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century (2018).

He and his wife Claudia Bushman live in New York City. Claudia Bushman, a social and cultural historian of the nineteenth century United States, taught at several universities, including Claremont Graduate University and Columbia University. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, Brigham Young University, and Boston University. She has written and edited several books. Her most recent is Going to Boston: Harriet Robinson’s Journey to New Womanhood, about women’s lives in 1870. She was the founding editor of Exponent II in 1974. With her husband Richard Lyman Bushman, she wrote Building the Kingdom of God in America and reared six children. The Bushmans and others are involved with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.