Biography

Allison Kelley is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. She is interested in religion, capitalism, and politics and is currently examining the intersection of these topics as it relates to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Allison graduated magna cum laude from Davidson College in 2015. She was part of the Kendrick K. Kelley Program in Historical Studies, and her senior thesis, “Hardly a Cultural Aberration: The North Carolina Eugenics Program, 1933-1977,” examines the gendered, racial, and class dimensions of North Carolina’s eugenics program. She received an M.A. from the University of Virginia in 2017. Her master’s thesis “No Place for Zion: Deseret Ranch and the Mainstreaming of Mormonism, 1950-1985,” details Latter-day Saints’ struggle to uphold dual commitments to faith and business within a society hostile to their theocratic vision.

Allison’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Faith and Free Markets: Latter-day Saints’ Social Welfare Ideology from the New Deal to Reagan’s America,” explains how Latter-day Saints’ opposition to the “Welfare State” initially emerged within the Church’s leadership after the Great Depression and became popularized among Saints as the century progressed. Her dissertation research has been funded by the Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities, the Mormon Women’s History Initiative, and the University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.