Claudia Lauper Bushman is an American historian and scholar whose work focuses on American social history, women’s history, and the experiences of Latter-day Saint women. She is professor emerita of American Studies at Columbia University and earned her Ph.D. in New England and American Studies from Boston University after completing her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College and an M.A. in American Literature at Brigham Young University.

Bushman has been an influential contributor to the study and preservation of Latter-day Saint women’s history. In the 1970s, she was among the founders of Exponent II and served as its first editor. She also helped develop research and courses on early Latter-day Saint women that became Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, an important early collection devoted to recovering women’s experiences in Latter-day Saint history.

Her scholarship extends well beyond Latter-day Saint studies. Her books include “A Good Poor Man’s Wife”: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England, America Discovers Columbus, Mormons in America, Building the Kingdom: A History of Mormons in America, and Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America. Her historical work is particularly interested in the everyday lives and experiences of ordinary people, especially women.

While teaching at Claremont Graduate University, Bushman established the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project, which collected first-person accounts of Latter-day Saint women and created new primary-source material for scholars and students. Some of those histories were subsequently published in Mormon Women Have Their Say: Essays from the Claremont Oral History Collection.

A lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Bushman has combined scholarship with active Church and community participation throughout her life. She is married to historian Richard Lyman Bushman, and they are the parents of six children.