2018-19
ASDAH Newsletter
The Newsletter of The Association of Seventh-day Adventist Historians 2018 - 2019
Editor: Kathrine A. Koh; President: Andrew Howe
Editor: Kathrine A. Koh; President: Andrew Howe
2019 ASDAH Conference at SWAU
The Conference theme is “Crossing the Threshold: 1919.”
The ninth triennial ASDAH conference will convene on the campus of Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas, May 16-18, 2019. Panels and papers are programmed that approach the theme – “Crossing the Threshold: 1919” – from a number of perspectives: historical, political, and sociological, from both U. S. and global foci. Although there will be a number of papers from various different frames and perspectives, ASDAH's traditional focus upon denominational history will of course provide the centerpiece of the conference, including the Dr. Gary Land Session on Adventist History.
Conference speakers will include:
- Kara Dixon Vuic (pictured below), LCpl Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society at Texas Christian University, for the keynote address on Thursday, and;
- McAdams, historian and former president of Southwestern, for the plenary address on Friday evening.
News From Our Colleagues
Nikolaus Satelmajer has been asked to serve as a member of the Finance Committee of the American Society of Church History. His three year term began in January.
Jonathan Butler has published a review essay titled “Seventh-Day Adventist Historiography: A Work in Progress,” in Church History 87 (March 2018), 149-166. In the essay, he divides Adventist historiography into “New History” and “New Apologetics,” reviewing a range of books from Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, ed. by Terrie Aamodt, Gary Land and Ronald Numbers, and a number of entries in the Adventist Pioneer Series, for which George Knight serves as senior editor. (A fuller description of the essay appears in the previous newsletter.) At the AAF Conference at La Sierra University on September 14-16, 2018, the 50th Anniversary of Spectrum, Butler delivered a plenary address on the importance of the last half century of Spectrum to Ellen White scholarship. The address can be live-streamed on the spectrummagazine.org blog. Butler also co-emceed, with Richard Rice, the Saturday night AAF dinner. He continues to serve on the McAdams Adventist History Research Grant Committee. In his spare time, he read Bob Woodward's Fear: Trump in the White House and now knows what real “fear" is.
Andrews University
From Brian Strayer: Although retired, I try to stay busy professionally, publishing the following this past year: Brian E. Strayer, John Byington: First General Conference President, Circuit-Riding Preacher, and Radical Reformer (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press Publishing Assoc., 2018), 326 pp. This book is #12 in the Adventist Pioneer Biography Series and came out in the spring of 2018. And, Brian E. Strayer, “Seeing Themselves as Others Saw Them: Battle Creek Adventists in the Public Eye, 1855-1890,” a paper given at the Situating Adventist History conference, Washington Adventist University, January 8, 2018.
I continue to write a weekly column entitled “The Past Is Always Present” in The Journal Era, a Berrien County newspaper, tracing the historical roots of common expressions, practices, inventions, and so forth and how they shape our lives today.
In September, I led a bus group from Anderson, Indiana, on a week-long Adventism in America tour of New England (RI, MA, CT, NH, VT).
For the centennial of Union Springs Academy (1921-2021) in upstate New York, the alumni association and academy administration have asked me to write the school’s history in book form. That should keep me occupied for the next two or three years!
Southern Adventist University
A few years ago, the History Department at SAU rebranded to the “History and Political Studies Department.” Last year we added both International Development Studies & Political Science as majors alongside the History degree. We are enjoying the diverse students that these majors have brought to us and look forward to maturing the programs. For the last six years, our students have participated in the Tennessee Intercollegiate Student Legislature in Nashville, and this year, as last year, they achieved the semi-finals status in the mock moot court before forfeiting the final competition due to Sabbath observance. This year, for the fourth time, we are hosting the Regional Student History Conference, a collaboration between SAU and four local colleges/universities that has gone on for 15 years now.
We added Michael Weismeyer to our department this semester, to fill Benjamin McArthur's position as an Americanist. He just completed his PhD from UCLA, writing a dissertation called “Science Education in Early California Colleges, 1850-1880.” Our political science professor, Shannon Martin is teaching part-time for us while working on her PhD in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Lisa Clark Diller is back from one year at Avondale College, and is very glad to be teaching in the US higher educational system again. She's currently finishing an article on Gilbert Burnet, a 17th century historian of English Protestantism and a bishop in the Church of England. Mark Peach was chair of the department while Lisa was gone and is winding up ten years as director of the Southern Scholars honors program. He'll be taking a sabbatical next year and will be researching in the area of environmental history.”
Friedensau Adventist University
Rolf Pöhler recently edited Perceptions of the Protestant Reformation in Seventh-day Adventism. Adventistica: Studies in Adventist History and Theology – New Series 1. Friedensau: Institute of Adventist Studies, 2018, 13–29. His colleague, Stefan Höschele, wrote “Interchurch Relations in Seventh-Day Adventist History: A Study in Ecumenics,” a post-doctoral thesis at the prestigious Charles University in Prague. If you are interested in a pdf of his thesis, you can contact him at [email protected].
Southwestern Adventist University
Amy Rebok Rosenthal, SWAU academic vice president and history professor, continued her research of the East Kent Lunatic Asylum in the UK with a visit to the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone, Kent, in October. She is currently looking at the construction of the asylum and place in the larger asylum movement of the late 19th century.
Randall Butler and Steve Jones published “Native American Crime, Policing, and Social Context” in the Handbook of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). They also published a book, Cesar Lombroso: The Father of Criminology Redefined (Kendall-Hunt) in early 2018. Jones is chair of the SWAU history department. Butler is retired from several decades of teaching at SDA and public universities.
Chloe Northrop, adjunct professor at SWAU, published “Satirical Prints and Imperial Masculinity: Johnny Newcome in the West Indies,” in the special issue Making Masculinity: Craft, Gender and Material Production in the Long Nineteenth Century of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Issue 14.2 (Fall 2018).
Elizabeth Bowser was on the program for a panel discussion at the ASDAH/ASTR/ WAU conference on Situating Adventist History in January 2018. The panel tackled the question “In a denomination so focused on the future, what is the place for the study of the past in the Seventh-day Adventist Church?”
And of course the SWAU department is busy planning to host the upcoming ASDAH conference in May 2019!
Walla Walla University
Walla Walla University was delighted to welcome Hilary Dickerson and Monique Vincent to the department this year.
Dickerson’s research focuses on the lives of Japanese physician Nobuo Tatsuguchi and American missionary to Japan Benjamin Hoffman. She examines the ways that their transpacific connections (from the 1910s through the 1940s) reflected the international tensions of the era and the friendships created by a common Seventh-day Adventist faith. She will be presenting on her research at the 2019 Association for Asian Studies and at the 2019 meeting of the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Librarians. She has a forthcoming chapter in a book titled Legacies of the Manhattan Project that details Japan’s English-language dailies and their portrayals of the atomic bomb from 1945-1946.
Vincent, who recently completed her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Chicago, brings a new archaeological focus to the department. She is co-director of the Balua Regional Archaeological Project in Jordan, which will be in the field this summer (2019). Her research focuses on ancient society and economy as seen from the perspective of the households and local communities of the Iron Age Southern Levant. She is an editor of the Madaba Plains Project publication series of excavations at Tall al-Umayri, Jordan, with a volume out in 2017 and another due in early 2019.
This year Greg Dodds published an article on Thomas More and delivered the Roland Blainton plenary address at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The lecture, titled “The Last Erasmians: Contesting the Public Memory of the Reformation in Restoration England,” focused on debates about the nature of the Reformation and how supporters of James II used Erasmus and his writings to advocate for religious toleration.
Terrie Aamodt participated in two workshops this past summer. The first was a seminar at Yale University: “The Civil War in American Memory,” directed by David Blight. She studied Civil War monuments in and around New Haven as well as many other topics related to Professor Blight’s work (his biography of Frederick Douglass was published in the fall of 2018). She also participated in an NEH Summer Institute, “The Visual Culture of the Civil War and Its Aftermath” at City University of New York Graduate Center, directed by professors Joshua Brown, Gregory Downs, and Sarah Burns, with several guest professors. The seminar included workshops at the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aamodt acquired a project there on the visual culture of the Jim Crow era that provides incentive to wrap up the Ellen White biography . . . very soon. Dr. Aamodt’s recent lectures include “The Hardest Question” at the Association of Adventist Forums 50th Anniversary Conference, at La Sierra University in September 2018; and “Civil War Monuments: Remembering and Forgetting,” a Walla Walla University CommUnity in October 2018. She gave an invited lecture, “When Religion Goes to War: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Civil War” for the 2018 Lincoln Symposium and Kincaid Lecture, “Faith in Lincoln’s America,” at Lincoln Memorial University in November 2018.
Union College
Ed Allen presented a paper at the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity in Edinburgh, Scotland. The paper grew out of the work he did on Seventh-day Adventist participation in the Student Volunteer Movement for foreign missions. The research and some travel funds were thanks to the McAdams Grants. The paper was titled: “The Form and Function of Prayer in the Student Volunteer Movement 1886 to 1914.” He and his wife enjoyed the conference and appreciated the hospitality of the University of Edinburgh School of Divinity at the New College. They attended a 90th birthday celebration for Andrew Walls, noted historian of missions, and had a brief chat with Lamin Sanneh from Yale, another noted historian of missions.
La Sierra University
Andrew Howe’s recent scholarship includes book chapters on the cinematic portrayals of Sara Roosevelt, gendertopia in The 100, and religion as portrayed in Game of Thrones, as well as an article on power and governance in The Walking Dead, in the Journal of Popular Television (co-authored with Sean Evans). Recent conference presentations include papers on John Christopher’s mid-century climate change fiction (Popular Culture Association) and the Odyssean dimensions of the cattle drive film (Pacific Ancient & Modern Languages Assoc.).
Katherine Koh spent this past spring on sabbatical, conducting research on a new project that follows the adventures of the Elizabethean jeweler, Sir William Herrick. Her research took her to archives in Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Leicester, and London. She is also in the process of finishing up articles and an edition of letters for the Oxford Historical Society. In her spare time, she has been preparing for her courses this year in Reformation history, Islamic history, intellectual history, and (of course) European history.
Alicia Gutierrez-Romine joined the department this past year, after completing her doctorate at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation was entitled: “From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969.” Alicia is an Americanist, and will bolster the department’s offerings in gender history, legal history, medical history, and California history.
After 27 years at La Sierra, 10 as chair of the department, Jeffrey N. Dupee retired this past summer and is enjoying life in Nipomo, California, along with his wife. He spends his time taking care of his two dogs and two turtles, and enjoying a stack of books.
River Plate Adventist University
River Plate Adventist University (UAP by its Spanish acronym) celebrated its 120th anniversary by publishing two books on institutional history through its press, Editorial UAP.
The 120th anniversary has awakened a renewed interest in the history of the university and the church in South America. Last year, the Centro Historico Adventista was inaugurated to function as a museum, archive of important historical document, and center of study. The head of the Centro is Silvia Sholtus, New Testament scholar and SDA historian.
Jonathan Butler has published a review essay titled “Seventh-Day Adventist Historiography: A Work in Progress,” in Church History 87 (March 2018), 149-166. In the essay, he divides Adventist historiography into “New History” and “New Apologetics,” reviewing a range of books from Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, ed. by Terrie Aamodt, Gary Land and Ronald Numbers, and a number of entries in the Adventist Pioneer Series, for which George Knight serves as senior editor. (A fuller description of the essay appears in the previous newsletter.) At the AAF Conference at La Sierra University on September 14-16, 2018, the 50th Anniversary of Spectrum, Butler delivered a plenary address on the importance of the last half century of Spectrum to Ellen White scholarship. The address can be live-streamed on the spectrummagazine.org blog. Butler also co-emceed, with Richard Rice, the Saturday night AAF dinner. He continues to serve on the McAdams Adventist History Research Grant Committee. In his spare time, he read Bob Woodward's Fear: Trump in the White House and now knows what real “fear" is.
Andrews University
From Brian Strayer: Although retired, I try to stay busy professionally, publishing the following this past year: Brian E. Strayer, John Byington: First General Conference President, Circuit-Riding Preacher, and Radical Reformer (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press Publishing Assoc., 2018), 326 pp. This book is #12 in the Adventist Pioneer Biography Series and came out in the spring of 2018. And, Brian E. Strayer, “Seeing Themselves as Others Saw Them: Battle Creek Adventists in the Public Eye, 1855-1890,” a paper given at the Situating Adventist History conference, Washington Adventist University, January 8, 2018.
I continue to write a weekly column entitled “The Past Is Always Present” in The Journal Era, a Berrien County newspaper, tracing the historical roots of common expressions, practices, inventions, and so forth and how they shape our lives today.
In September, I led a bus group from Anderson, Indiana, on a week-long Adventism in America tour of New England (RI, MA, CT, NH, VT).
For the centennial of Union Springs Academy (1921-2021) in upstate New York, the alumni association and academy administration have asked me to write the school’s history in book form. That should keep me occupied for the next two or three years!
Southern Adventist University
A few years ago, the History Department at SAU rebranded to the “History and Political Studies Department.” Last year we added both International Development Studies & Political Science as majors alongside the History degree. We are enjoying the diverse students that these majors have brought to us and look forward to maturing the programs. For the last six years, our students have participated in the Tennessee Intercollegiate Student Legislature in Nashville, and this year, as last year, they achieved the semi-finals status in the mock moot court before forfeiting the final competition due to Sabbath observance. This year, for the fourth time, we are hosting the Regional Student History Conference, a collaboration between SAU and four local colleges/universities that has gone on for 15 years now.
We added Michael Weismeyer to our department this semester, to fill Benjamin McArthur's position as an Americanist. He just completed his PhD from UCLA, writing a dissertation called “Science Education in Early California Colleges, 1850-1880.” Our political science professor, Shannon Martin is teaching part-time for us while working on her PhD in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Lisa Clark Diller is back from one year at Avondale College, and is very glad to be teaching in the US higher educational system again. She's currently finishing an article on Gilbert Burnet, a 17th century historian of English Protestantism and a bishop in the Church of England. Mark Peach was chair of the department while Lisa was gone and is winding up ten years as director of the Southern Scholars honors program. He'll be taking a sabbatical next year and will be researching in the area of environmental history.”
Friedensau Adventist University
Rolf Pöhler recently edited Perceptions of the Protestant Reformation in Seventh-day Adventism. Adventistica: Studies in Adventist History and Theology – New Series 1. Friedensau: Institute of Adventist Studies, 2018, 13–29. His colleague, Stefan Höschele, wrote “Interchurch Relations in Seventh-Day Adventist History: A Study in Ecumenics,” a post-doctoral thesis at the prestigious Charles University in Prague. If you are interested in a pdf of his thesis, you can contact him at [email protected].
Southwestern Adventist University
Amy Rebok Rosenthal, SWAU academic vice president and history professor, continued her research of the East Kent Lunatic Asylum in the UK with a visit to the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone, Kent, in October. She is currently looking at the construction of the asylum and place in the larger asylum movement of the late 19th century.
Randall Butler and Steve Jones published “Native American Crime, Policing, and Social Context” in the Handbook of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). They also published a book, Cesar Lombroso: The Father of Criminology Redefined (Kendall-Hunt) in early 2018. Jones is chair of the SWAU history department. Butler is retired from several decades of teaching at SDA and public universities.
Chloe Northrop, adjunct professor at SWAU, published “Satirical Prints and Imperial Masculinity: Johnny Newcome in the West Indies,” in the special issue Making Masculinity: Craft, Gender and Material Production in the Long Nineteenth Century of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Issue 14.2 (Fall 2018).
Elizabeth Bowser was on the program for a panel discussion at the ASDAH/ASTR/ WAU conference on Situating Adventist History in January 2018. The panel tackled the question “In a denomination so focused on the future, what is the place for the study of the past in the Seventh-day Adventist Church?”
And of course the SWAU department is busy planning to host the upcoming ASDAH conference in May 2019!
Walla Walla University
Walla Walla University was delighted to welcome Hilary Dickerson and Monique Vincent to the department this year.
Dickerson’s research focuses on the lives of Japanese physician Nobuo Tatsuguchi and American missionary to Japan Benjamin Hoffman. She examines the ways that their transpacific connections (from the 1910s through the 1940s) reflected the international tensions of the era and the friendships created by a common Seventh-day Adventist faith. She will be presenting on her research at the 2019 Association for Asian Studies and at the 2019 meeting of the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Librarians. She has a forthcoming chapter in a book titled Legacies of the Manhattan Project that details Japan’s English-language dailies and their portrayals of the atomic bomb from 1945-1946.
Vincent, who recently completed her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Chicago, brings a new archaeological focus to the department. She is co-director of the Balua Regional Archaeological Project in Jordan, which will be in the field this summer (2019). Her research focuses on ancient society and economy as seen from the perspective of the households and local communities of the Iron Age Southern Levant. She is an editor of the Madaba Plains Project publication series of excavations at Tall al-Umayri, Jordan, with a volume out in 2017 and another due in early 2019.
This year Greg Dodds published an article on Thomas More and delivered the Roland Blainton plenary address at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The lecture, titled “The Last Erasmians: Contesting the Public Memory of the Reformation in Restoration England,” focused on debates about the nature of the Reformation and how supporters of James II used Erasmus and his writings to advocate for religious toleration.
Terrie Aamodt participated in two workshops this past summer. The first was a seminar at Yale University: “The Civil War in American Memory,” directed by David Blight. She studied Civil War monuments in and around New Haven as well as many other topics related to Professor Blight’s work (his biography of Frederick Douglass was published in the fall of 2018). She also participated in an NEH Summer Institute, “The Visual Culture of the Civil War and Its Aftermath” at City University of New York Graduate Center, directed by professors Joshua Brown, Gregory Downs, and Sarah Burns, with several guest professors. The seminar included workshops at the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aamodt acquired a project there on the visual culture of the Jim Crow era that provides incentive to wrap up the Ellen White biography . . . very soon. Dr. Aamodt’s recent lectures include “The Hardest Question” at the Association of Adventist Forums 50th Anniversary Conference, at La Sierra University in September 2018; and “Civil War Monuments: Remembering and Forgetting,” a Walla Walla University CommUnity in October 2018. She gave an invited lecture, “When Religion Goes to War: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Civil War” for the 2018 Lincoln Symposium and Kincaid Lecture, “Faith in Lincoln’s America,” at Lincoln Memorial University in November 2018.
Union College
Ed Allen presented a paper at the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity in Edinburgh, Scotland. The paper grew out of the work he did on Seventh-day Adventist participation in the Student Volunteer Movement for foreign missions. The research and some travel funds were thanks to the McAdams Grants. The paper was titled: “The Form and Function of Prayer in the Student Volunteer Movement 1886 to 1914.” He and his wife enjoyed the conference and appreciated the hospitality of the University of Edinburgh School of Divinity at the New College. They attended a 90th birthday celebration for Andrew Walls, noted historian of missions, and had a brief chat with Lamin Sanneh from Yale, another noted historian of missions.
La Sierra University
Andrew Howe’s recent scholarship includes book chapters on the cinematic portrayals of Sara Roosevelt, gendertopia in The 100, and religion as portrayed in Game of Thrones, as well as an article on power and governance in The Walking Dead, in the Journal of Popular Television (co-authored with Sean Evans). Recent conference presentations include papers on John Christopher’s mid-century climate change fiction (Popular Culture Association) and the Odyssean dimensions of the cattle drive film (Pacific Ancient & Modern Languages Assoc.).
Katherine Koh spent this past spring on sabbatical, conducting research on a new project that follows the adventures of the Elizabethean jeweler, Sir William Herrick. Her research took her to archives in Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Leicester, and London. She is also in the process of finishing up articles and an edition of letters for the Oxford Historical Society. In her spare time, she has been preparing for her courses this year in Reformation history, Islamic history, intellectual history, and (of course) European history.
Alicia Gutierrez-Romine joined the department this past year, after completing her doctorate at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation was entitled: “From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969.” Alicia is an Americanist, and will bolster the department’s offerings in gender history, legal history, medical history, and California history.
After 27 years at La Sierra, 10 as chair of the department, Jeffrey N. Dupee retired this past summer and is enjoying life in Nipomo, California, along with his wife. He spends his time taking care of his two dogs and two turtles, and enjoying a stack of books.
River Plate Adventist University
River Plate Adventist University (UAP by its Spanish acronym) celebrated its 120th anniversary by publishing two books on institutional history through its press, Editorial UAP.
- La formación teológica en la UAP. Una historia de excelencia y servicio: 1898-2018 [Theological Training in UAP, A History of Excellence and Service: 1898-2018], by Daniel Plenc, current professor of Church History and Systematics.
- Historia de la Universidad Adventista del Plata: Puerta a la excelencia y el servicio [History of the River Plate Adventist University: A Door to Excellence and Service], by retired professor of History, Juan Carlos Priora.
The 120th anniversary has awakened a renewed interest in the history of the university and the church in South America. Last year, the Centro Historico Adventista was inaugurated to function as a museum, archive of important historical document, and center of study. The head of the Centro is Silvia Sholtus, New Testament scholar and SDA historian.
“Situating Adventist History” Conference
A summary of the conference
In January 2018, SDA historians gathered in Maryland for the "Situating Adventist History" conference, spearheaded by David Trim (Director, Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research of the General Conference) and co-sponsored by ASTR, Washington Adventist University, and the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Historians. Most of the first day was held on the campus of Washington Adventist University. After a brief welcome by representatives of each sponsoring entity, and a devotional by William Knott (Adventist Review), attendees were treated to two plenary sessions. In the first, Nicholas Miller (SDA Theological Seminary) spoke on fundamentalism and its connection to Adventism, and Alec Ryrie (University of Durham) gave a talk on the positioning of Adventism in Protestant history. After a brief break, the second plenary session featured Reggie Williams (McCormick Theological Seminary) and his talk on black Christianity, and David Holland (Harvard University) on Adventist placement within the context of other emergent nineteenth century religious movements. The day concluded at the General Conference headquarters, with a tour of the Ellen G. White Estate and GC Archives followed by a banquet and panel discussion, moderated by Edward Allen (Union College), involving current threads and trends in history and related disciplines.
The second day of this two-day conference was held at the GC. After a devotional by David Trim and a welcome by Ted N. C. Wilson (General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists), attendees were treated to papers on a wide variety of topics relevant to church history and related issues. Panels included papers in the following areas: Adventism and Wider Society in the Middle and Late Nineteenth Century; Adventist Mission in Transnational and International Perspective; Contextualizing African-American History; Oral History and Adventist History; and, Autobiographical and Autoreferential Adventist Writings. All in all, 16 papers were delivered by academics from 13 institutions/organizations, all serving to critically re-assess Adventist history. It was a thought-provoking and memorable conference for all who attended.
The second day of this two-day conference was held at the GC. After a devotional by David Trim and a welcome by Ted N. C. Wilson (General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists), attendees were treated to papers on a wide variety of topics relevant to church history and related issues. Panels included papers in the following areas: Adventism and Wider Society in the Middle and Late Nineteenth Century; Adventist Mission in Transnational and International Perspective; Contextualizing African-American History; Oral History and Adventist History; and, Autobiographical and Autoreferential Adventist Writings. All in all, 16 papers were delivered by academics from 13 institutions/organizations, all serving to critically re-assess Adventist history. It was a thought-provoking and memorable conference for all who attended.
McAdams Grant Scholarship and Application
Southwestern Adventist University is now in its fifth year as host of the Dr. Donald R. and Anne P. McAdams Seventh-day Adventist History grants. Since its inception in December 2014, the grant board has awarded grants to 19 historians totaling more than $60,000. Grant funds are provided by Dr. and Mrs. McAdams with matching grants from the ExxonMobil Foundations.
Some grant recipients have been:
All scholars of Adventist history are invited to submit applications for research funding through the McAdams grant, which is intended to fund significant projects in Millerite and Adventist history that will result in publication. Scholars holding a Ph.D. in history (or related field) or who have demonstrated competence in the field of Adventist history are eligible to apply. Grants are not intended to aid research for completion of doctoral work, although funding may be available for scholars who are revising completed dissertations for publication. Grants will ordinarily be in the range of $3,000 to $10,000. Follow-up grants for large projects may be available.
Applicants should complete the application form (included here but also found at the ASDAH website, under Research Funding, which asks for a short description of the project. If a project is judged to be promising, the committee will ask for a fuller statement (1,200-2,000 words), including a proposed budget. Application letters should be sent to:
Steve Jones
Department of History
Southwestern Adventist University
100 W. Hillcrest, Keene, TX, 76059.
Deadlines for consideration in 2019 are April 1 and November 1. A selection committee (Steve Jones, Terrie Aamodt, Eric Anderson, and Jonathan Butler) will review applications and make recommendations.
The grant application form is below:
Some grant recipients have been:
- Jonathan Butler, who is working on Ellen G. White: A Cultural Biography. Butler used his grant to fund research trips to Berrien Springs for research in the Smith-Boyee and SpicerAndrews collections, and to Washington, D.C., to interview members of the White Estate. An offshoot of this research was Butler’s article “Seventh-day Adventist Historiography: A Work in Progress,” for Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture.
- Ed Allen, who is researching Seventh-day Adventist participation in the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM). His research has taken him to the Adventist Archives in Washington DC, Walla Walla College, Pacific Union College, Andrews University, Washington Adventist University, Yale University, and Columbia University. From the visits to Andrews and Yale, Allen was able to gain a view of how broadly Adventists participated in the SVM. As a result of this research, he presented a paper at ASDAH 2016 entitled, “The Impact of the Student Volunteer Movement on the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”
- Gilbert Valentine, who is working on a biography of John Nevins Andrews. The grant enabled Valentine to complete a 650-page draft manuscript, John Nevins Andrews: Scholarly Missionary of the First Rank, for submission to Pacific Press; present a scholarly paper, “Personal Diaries and the Study of Adventist History: Filling out the Context of Adventist Events and Communities,” at the ASDAH meeting Situating Adventist History in January 2018, and write a paper entitled “J.N. Andrews and the ‘Success’ of the European Mission,’ for the Friedensau Adventist Studies Conference in April 2018.
- Douglas Morgan, who used his grant to research “James H. Howard and the Rise of Adventism as an African-American Religious Alternative, 1896–1919,” which he presented at the Situating Adventist History conference.
- Ruth Crocombe, who used grant funds to research, write, and present “A troubled legacy: Seventh-day Adventist writing about China after 1950” at the 2016 ASDAH conference, and to research her paper “The employment of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries by Soong Meiling and Chiang Kai-shek,” which she presented at a meeting of the American Society of Church History in January 2018, Washington, DC
All scholars of Adventist history are invited to submit applications for research funding through the McAdams grant, which is intended to fund significant projects in Millerite and Adventist history that will result in publication. Scholars holding a Ph.D. in history (or related field) or who have demonstrated competence in the field of Adventist history are eligible to apply. Grants are not intended to aid research for completion of doctoral work, although funding may be available for scholars who are revising completed dissertations for publication. Grants will ordinarily be in the range of $3,000 to $10,000. Follow-up grants for large projects may be available.
Applicants should complete the application form (included here but also found at the ASDAH website, under Research Funding, which asks for a short description of the project. If a project is judged to be promising, the committee will ask for a fuller statement (1,200-2,000 words), including a proposed budget. Application letters should be sent to:
Steve Jones
Department of History
Southwestern Adventist University
100 W. Hillcrest, Keene, TX, 76059.
Deadlines for consideration in 2019 are April 1 and November 1. A selection committee (Steve Jones, Terrie Aamodt, Eric Anderson, and Jonathan Butler) will review applications and make recommendations.
The grant application form is below:
McAdams Research Grant Application
Name__________________________
Institutional Affiliation____________________
Project Title_________________________________________________
(Please attach a 1200-1500 description of your project, its significance for Adventist history, the nature of your research, a time frame for the completion of your project, and how the grant will be used)
Amount Requested:
Estimated Breakdown of Expenses:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Will this grant be in addition to institutional funding you will receive for this project? ___________________________________________________________________
Other comments about the project you may wish to add:
Signature: _____________________
Date: _____________________