Mary Campbell, who is both an assistant professor in the School of Art and a lawyer, argues that Mormons may switch their party allegiance in the upcoming presidential election, which means “the country’s forty-fifth state [Utah] may swing Democratic for the first time in more than fifty years.”
She recently wrote an opinion piece on the topic in The Hill, a top US political website.
Campbell said the religious intolerance and persecution that Mormons experienced as a result of practicing polygamy may be driving their response to Trump’s campaign.
“The Latter-day Saints—a people who for so long appeared to have deliberately forgotten their separatist nineteenth-century origins as part of a campaign to restyle themselves as model Americans—might now embrace those origins as a way of rejecting Trump,” she wrote.
Campbell, who is a non-Mormon Utah native, combines her interest in art and the law to study the intersections of American legal and visual culture.
Her areas of expertise include the history of nineteenth-century art, the history of nineteenth-century Mormonism, and the country’s legal and cultural response to Mormon polygamy. She has published on the topic in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. Her forthcoming book, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Image, will explore this issue further when it comes out in November.
Mary Campbell is available at 865-974-7828 or mcampb33@utk.edu.
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CONTACT:
Amy Blakely (ablakely@utk.edu, 865-974-5034)