Claremont Graduate University in Southern California has announced the creation of a professorship in Mormon studies and has signed one of the Mormon world's most prominent historians to fill the spot.

The position, the Howard W. Hunter Visiting Professorship in Mormon Studies, will be filled in the Fall of 2008 by Dr. Richard Lyman Bushman. Bushman is a prominent scholar of Mormonism and of U.S. history. He is professor emeritus of early American history at Columbia University. Howard W. Hunter was the fourteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church).




According to a report by the LA Times, "Bushman is a devout Mormon - he is a patriarch, a respected elder who offers blessings, in the Mormon stake in Manhattan - who in the past year has gained national attention as a media commentator about Mormonism's role in American life and the presidential candidacy of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is Mormon."

Dr. Karen Torjesen, Dean of Claremont's School of Religion, said "We consider him (Bushman) to be the single most widely known and highly regarded historian of Mormonism. We are committed to studying the full breadth of religious experience. With his broad background in American cultural and religious history, Professor Bushman will make a vitally important contribution to our mission."

Bushman's appointment and the new professorship will hopefully lead to a Mormon studies program at Claremont. Only one other secular university in America has a program in Mormon studies; Utah State began one earlier this year.

In addition to Columbia, Bushman has taught at Boston University, Brown, , Harvard, the University of Delaware and Brigham Young University. Bushman's 2005 biography of Mormonism founder, Joseph Smith, won the Evans Biography Award and the Mormon History Association Best Book Award.

The blogosphere is filled with reaction to the appointment. Dr. Paul Harvey, currently part of the history department at the University of Colorado, takes a look at the place of Mormonism in U.S. history. Charles Johnson had this to say: "I couldn't be more excited. Finally, political and social diversity!"

Claremont Graduate University is part of a consortium of seven academic institutions founded on the Oxford model in 1925. It has about 2,200 students in eight academic schools.