CALL FOR PAPERS
Submit here by October 31, 2025

 

LETTER & SPIRIT

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The Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) is delighted to announce its May 2026 conference at the historic William & Mary campus on the theme of Letter & Spirit with a submission deadline of October 31, 2025. 

 

The MSH Board invites interested conference attendees to join us at the historic and leafy William & Mary campus in Williamsburg, Virginia. Chartered in 1693, William & Mary is the second oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Two and a half hours south of Washington DC and a short distance from Yorktown and Jamestown (bookends for America's colonial history), situated in colonial Williamsburg, the campus offers a living history museum, rich archives, and preserved urban landscape for reassessing the foundations of American and global governance, society, and culture in light of restorationist studies.

Boasting social events like tours to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and hosted by Nathan B. Oman, Rita Anne Rollins Professor of Law, the MSH 2026 conference welcomes the broadest interpretation of “letter and spirit” to a range of humanities disciplines: law and policy, anthropology, archaeology, art, architecture, classics, comparative literature, culture, dance, ethics, film studies, folklore, gender studies, history, languages, law and policy, linguistics, literature, media studies, musicology, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, theater, theology, and many others.

A short drive from the Richmond International Airport (with carpooling in the works), and accessible from DC airports by train, the conference site on Williams & Mary will be walkable to a number of modest restaurants and an affordable conference hotel (farther options are also available, although the conference hotel will likely be a very pleasant mile walk from the venue). In addition to the annual cream soda social, admitted conference participants will be invited to the event as a summer retreat for revisiting letter & spirit, humanities & humanity—Mormon, scholarly, and otherwise—together.

The Board is also delighted to announce Professor Oman as the MSH 2026 keynote speaker. Professor Oman, author or editor of six books, including three on law and Mormonism, will speak on law and Mormon interpretation. Both Mormon scripture and Mormon experience are saturated with law. It is thus somewhat surprising that Latter-day Saints—especially in the 19th century, when they pursued overtly theocratic ambitions and used church courts as a primary legal forum—never developed a legal hermeneutic such as that found in Jewish halakhah, Islamic fiqh, or Christian canon law. Why? Professor Oman will explore what the answer to this question reveals about the role of narrative and authority in Mormon thought.

The conference organizers follow Professor Oman in opening up the theme of Letter & Spirit to broad and creative interpretations within the field of humanities. More generally, how can we (mis)understand the letter and spirit of any humanistic tradition? What is at stake in literalness—a letter, the lettered tradition of the humanities, the letters that compose alphabets and literacy, the letters in scripture (Pauline, D&C) or social posts today? What is at stake in the spirit, the ghost (or Geist in German), and the holy humanities (or Geisteswissenschaften in German)? What is at stake in the and between “letter and spirit,” the interrelationship between literalism and literariness, enforcement and interpretation, fixed revelatory scripts and ecstatic revelatory receivings? What might it mean to reverse their order: “spirit and letter”? Or the plural forms: “letters and spirits”?

The theme opens the doors to major areas of inquiry including and beyond the following: literal and intentional interpretation (when is a word original? How would we know?), compliance and evasion (how might the techniques of humanities let the spirit work outside of the letter, or lettered interpretation without the spirit?), and ethical and legal behavior (ethics and legal standards are sure separable except under which standards and spirit of fairness and justice?); also, the word as both flexible and rigid (what resources, media, forms, genres, etc. grant restorationist agency to scrupulous and dextrous interpretation?) with literate loopholes between principle and detail, purpose and function (when do details matter more than principles, when does the spirit rule over operation?), and many others. A summer nearabroad to Washington DC, our conference invites cross-cutting questions about legitimacy and trust: when and why should individuals and institutions build or break trust with lawmakers? How should humanists of the restoration rethink church and state? When is the restoration a conservative tradition, when is it a fiery revolution, and how might actors renew or collapse the difference to gainful effect (see more on Nate’s comments here)? Generally, we take a moment to awe at the creation of all things literal and spiritual: when are letters haunted or holy? When are ghosts scripted or bound? How does, or should, one think about the lettered tradition? How, if at all, should we relate to Mormon law, stretched over the bent lumber of humanities? Should it enchant, disenchant, reenchant, or something else? 

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:
 

• A critical analysis of the letter–spirit dialectic in non-Western philosophical traditions (could be historical or contemporary texts, performances, films, social media, or other cultural expressions);

• A textual analysis or genealogy of a canonical work that embodies the tension between letter and spirit (e.g., tracing its interpretive history, situating its place in legal or literary canons, or analyzing its historical construction through the lens of embodiment, gender, or cultural transmission);

• A reflection on the states of humanistic inquiry, broadly read: how does one think about, luxuriate in, or defend the state of the humanities when both letter and spirit feel under attack or duress? 

• Canon formation, the hermeneutic wars, and the making of interpretive communities across literature, law, and theology;

• With a bookmark in phenomenology (cf. Merleau-Ponty on embodied meaning) and a footnote in the digital humanities, when does a text become a living “inter-text” that breathes between letter and spirit (pneuma)?

• A critique of juridical, theological, and literary vocabularies of interpretation: Why might, say, the language of embodied cognition or performative utterances be a more useful framework than traditional hermeneutics? Seers and hearers, touchers and makers of the word? 

• (Speaking of performative utterances…) A comparative analysis of courtly institutions across marriage law and literary courts: How do ceremonial practices, legal procedures, and courtly love traditions navigate the tension between formal protocols (letter) and affective, affectionate bonds (spirit)? Why, if at all, do love marriages require law? What of plural marriages and plural laws?

• A feminist critique of masculine traditions of scriptural interpretation and their impact across theology, law, and literary studies;

• An exploration of genealogical archives and family history as sites where the letter of documentation meets the spirit of ancestral presence: How do bloodlines become textual lines, and what interpretive communities form around inherited narratives?

• A poetic investigation of the oral-literate divide, examining how spoken words carry embodied breath while written verse fixes spirit in letter. What happens in the translation between voice and page, between performance and permanence?

• A rhetorical study of the clarity-metaphor spectrum in humanistic discourse: when might the pursuit of clarity obscure the fruits of figurative language, and when might figurative language obscure the plain truth? In the wake of, say, Paul of Taursus and Joseph Smith, Martha and Mary, Norbert Schmitt and Jacques Lacan, how do different disciplines negotiate this hermeneutic tension?

• A theological meditation on embodied pluralism and the many spirits that inhabit diverse bodies: How might a truly incarnational theology account for the multiplicity of ways spirit manifests through different cultural, gendered, and scripted experiences?

• Commentary on colonial hermeneutics in or near colonial Williamsburg, Indigenous epistemologies, oral traditions, and theologies of embodied knowledge;

• Archival silences, citational violence, and acts of interpretive resistance;

• A poem or creative work on the extra-textual meaning of embodied knowledge transmission, whether through dance, music, ritual, or maternal pedagogy: who speaks on behalf of the written word beyond Derrida, Butler, and the archive (Church “arch-hive”)?

• How might interpretive practices be critically rethought, in or beyond academic culture (lectures, performances, postdigital humanities), as a kind of proxy embodiment and reclaiming of ancestral knowledge? 

• A philosophical exegesis of natality and new beginnings, or other themes of emergence, on how bodies ground spirits to earthly practices, gestures, and lived experience; or

• A new liturgy or performance piece, composed by a panel of artists and scholars either beforehand or collaboratively at the conference.
   

A few practical case studies and workshops:
 

• Creative and fresh poetic readings of all kinds; 

• Workshops on best practices for sustaining dialogue between letter and spirit across the humanities;

• Explorations of the role of embodied practices in knowledge transmission—dance, music, ritual, and maternal pedagogies in cultural preservation;

• Panels on the institutional, technological, and other challenges to producing humanistic scholarship that honors both textual precision and spiritual depth, particularly in this moment when both are under social and political strain;

• Other comments on the social construction of meaning-making in an age of artificial intelligence and digital mediation.
   

The conference also makes special welcome to those contributing to or interested in the contemporaneous Wayfare Magazine forum A New Story of Creation: Latter-day Science (click here for CFP). (Both Wayfare and MSH welcome cross-posting and recirculation; a paper submitted to one may be presented at the other, etc.) 

A conference on “letter and spirit” also invites reflection on who reads, who writes, who archives—and under whose terms, citations, genders, races, classes, institutions, and silences?

With this introduction the conference topic of Letter & Spirit, the MSH Board also welcomes the many other thematic works in the humanities, inviting papers and panels framed beyond the conference theme. We stress that all serious expressions of interest in the humanities, broadly read, are welcomed, especially those that serve one’s current professional research interests or pedagogy in the humanities. We welcome special paper and panel proposals that focus on humanistic scholarship with or across any restorationist impulse. When in doubt, remember: a sufficient submission abstract anchors a clear argument in a text with enough specificity that the abstract would fit any scholarly conference program in the humanities. 

Interested scholars (rising, independent, affiliated), graduate students, and 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).

Proposals received by October 31, 2025 will be fully considered. Notifications will be sent out no later than November 30, 2025.

Application instructions:

Please complete the following 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 closer to 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 included in the one or two virtual panels we anticipate hosting; 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. Information about the registration fee and available lodging will be posted soon at mormonscholars.net.
 

Please submit proposals here:

Please direct questions to MSH President Benjamin Peters bjpeters@gmail.com

with MSH Secretary Hillary Bowler Davis hbdavis.byu@gmail.com and the MSH general email on cc: admin@mormonscholars.net.