Marisol Quaye
The founding convenor, a historian of American new religious movements who built this course around the 1844 succession crisis.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- marisol.quaye@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for course-level questions; use the weekly lab for feedback on work.
Marisol’s research tracks what happens to a religious movement in the years after its founder dies without naming an heir — who claims the mantle, who walks away, and which claims manage to outlive the argument that produced them. The Latter Day Saint succession crisis is the case she keeps returning to, because several of the churches it produced are still active today, in Salt Lake City, Independence, and elsewhere.
She designed this course to spend a full semester inside that one fracture rather than surveying a dozen unrelated schisms, on the theory that you learn the mechanics of institutional splitting better from one case studied closely than from many studied thinly. Office hours run by email; expect a reply within two working days during term.