Konden R. Smith Hansen

Author, Historian, Educator, Learning Designer

Konden R. Smith Hansen holds degrees in History, Education, and Religious Studies from Northern Arizona University (BA, Religious Studies; BA, History) and Arizona State University (MA, PhD, Religious Studies; M.Ed., Learning Design and Technologies). Smith Hansen is an award winning author, research fellow, and Lecturer of religious studies at The University of Arizona.

While specializing in American religious history, Dr. Smith Hansen has proficiency in teaching university courses in World Religions, Religious Violence and Terrorism, Religion and Film, Pop Culture and Religion, Mysticism, and Mormonism in American History and Culture. In 2017 he took part in the Summer Institute program with the National Endowment for the Humanities with James Laine titled, World Religions and World Religious Discourse: Challenges of Teaching the Religions of the World, July 9 to Aug 4. In 2018 he helped create the Religious Studies minor for Arizona Online at The University of Arizona, where he has created and regularly teaches half a dozen courses. Smith Hansen teaches both in person and online courses, all of which are Quality Matter’s certified.

Dr. Smith Hansen’s major publications includes two award winning books: Frontier Religion: Mormons and America, 1857-1907 (University of Utah Press, August 2019) and The Reed Smoot Hearings: Investigations of a Mormon Senator and the Making of an American Religion (University of Colorado Press – Utah State University Press, 2021).

Frontier Religion won “Best First Book” from the Mormon History Association (2020), and looks at the conflicts and transformations of both Mormons and Protestants between the years 1857-1907, with an emphasis on the role of the frontier in these dynamics. As a national myth, the frontier acted like a religion, complete with its own rituals, sacred texts, and mythologies. While larger than both its Protestant and Mormon disciples, this invisible “frontier religion” informed and discerned both faiths, transforming both. Importantly, religious imaginations of the frontier that informed the theocratic kingdoms of both groups in the 1850s, again affirmed itself in new ways in the secular-progressive era at the end and beginning of the next century. By looking at important touch-point events throughout this half century (the Utah War, anti-Polygamy crusades, the Chicago World’s Fair, and the Smoot Hearings), Frontier Religion weaves together a half century of religious imagination about the frontier that informed what it meant to be white, American, as well as religious, at a time when all were bitterly contested. You can read more about Frontier Religion here. The book is also as an ebook and on audible.

Dr. Smith Hansen’s research looks at the changing face of religion and the role it plays in America’s cultural, political, and social transformations that are important to religious minority groups and those of the dominant culture. An important part of this context has been the internal and well as external shifts that emerge during periods of national crisis, and the ways important terms like “religion” and the “secular” get utilized and redefined in ways that create and invent new ways of relating to the modern nation-state. His scholarship has appeared in numerous peer-review outlets, including The Journal of Mormon History, Religion and the American West, Reading Religion, Bloomsbury Religion in North America, and Mormons and American Popular Culture, as well as several other edited collections.

Awarded “Best Anthology” by the John Whitmer Historical Association (2022), The Reed Smoot Hearings: Investigations of a Mormon Senator and the Making of an American Religion, is a co-edited volume with Michael Harold Paulos. The Reed Smoot Hearings contains various contributions from a wide-range of scholars that highlight important themes surrounding the Senate Hearings of Apostle-Senator Reed Smoot. Smoot’s election in Utah initiated nation-wide protests and provoked a popular defense of Protestant purity and privilege in American politics. The debates in the Senate committee that mediated this popular opposition against Senator Smoot articulate an important moment in the secularization of America’s political as well as religious institutions. These intensive debates worked to define on a more popular level the proper role of religion in American public society, helping to bring about American secularization and the new rules Mormonism (and other minority faiths) had to succumb to in order to belong. Smoot’s ultimate inclusion into the Senate contributed to this redefinition of religion within this new secular America and the limits of religious tolerance.

Another passion of Smith Hansen’s professional work is Learning Design, especially with the growth of online learning. Smith Hansen is a research fellow for the University of Arizona’s UCATT program, currently conducting research on the effectiveness of digital technology in the classroom. As part of this research, Smith Hansen created the Understanding Religion Series, which include 5 learning videos from five major traditions that take students into various religious sites, with conversations with the various community religious leaders throughout Tucson, Arizona. Each video is designed in consideration of research-based methods to instill cognitive, teacher, and social presence in the online and in person classroom. Research for this project will be published in the upcoming SAGE Handbook for Instructional Designers.

Currently, Smith Hansen is working on Zealous: Tales of an Extremely Righteous Missionary and his Battles with Satan in San Francisco, a graphic novel outlining experiences of a young missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This novel looks into the mind of a teenager from Orem, Utah, called of God to preach the Gospel in one of America’s most iconic and diverse cities. Each pages observes the mental, physical, and emotional processes that transformed an otherwise fiercely independent kid into an unquestioning representative and zealous advocate of his institutional church. Zealous represents a fresh and graphic look into the peculiar logic of religious zealotry and the structural processes that transform individuals into that of a larger religious collective.

Dr. Smith Hansen has been a voice for issues concerning American religion and new religious movements more generally. His interviews and talks have appeared on radio, podcast, and television programs like C-Span BookTV, New Books Network, National Public Radio’s (NPR) KJZZ The Show, KPNX (12 News-Phoenix), Arizona Daily Star, the University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies Scholars and Saints, as well as public events like the University of Arizona’s Humanities Festival, The American Academy of Religion, MIT World Peace, and the Parliament of World Religions.

An active participant in the fields of American Religion, Learning Design, and Religion in the American West, Dr. Smith Hansen has been involved in a number of activities and associations. He was previously co-chair of the Religion in American section for the American Academy of Religion, Western Region. Dr. Smith Hansen also chaired a panel on Mormonism at the Western History Association in 2020.