Library & Open Learning Services

Annual Juanita Brooks Lecture Series

Mission

The Juanita Brooks Lecture Series (JBLS) celebrates the legacy and scholarly contributions of Juanita Brooks. The JBLS, sponsored by the Utah Tech Library, promotes and supports learning and intellectual engagement for students, faculty, staff, and community to promote the library as a center of academic research and scholarship at Utah Tech. The lecture series also serves an advocacy and development opportunity for the Library.

Background of Lecture Series

The Juanita Brooks Lecture Series (JBLS) at UT was created in 1984 and endowed two years later by the O. C. Tanner Foundation. There has been, with a few exceptions, one lecture presented each year since.

The JBLS is named in honor of Juanita Brooks, who is a past faculty of UT and is credited as the first person to apply historical research methods to a sensitive Mormon history topic in her book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre. The Mountain Meadows Massacre was a tragedy debated with little objectivity before Brooks, who dealt with the topic neither to “whitewash nor to lay blame”¹. She is a well-remembered and loved part of Southern Utah history. Having an academic Southern Utah history lecture series named in Brooks’ honor is fitting and resonates well with the local community.

¹ A. R. Mortensen, “Reviewed Work: Mountain Meadows Massacre by Juanita Brooks,” Pacific Historical Review 20, no. 2 (May 1951): 180.

Lectures