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Valerie M. Hudson is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the George H.W. Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Program on Women, Peace, and Security. She has previously taught at Brigham Young, Northwestern, and Rutgers universities. Her research foci include foreign policy analysis, security studies, gender and international relations, and methodology. Hudson’s articles have appeared in such journals as International Security, Journal of Peace Research, American Political Science Review, and Foreign Policy Analysis. She is the author or editor of several books, including (with Andrea Den Boer) Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004), which won the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social Demography, resulting in feature stories in the New York Times, The Economist, 60 Minutes, and other news publications. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009. Winner of numerous teaching awards and recipient of a National Science Foundation research grant and a Minerva Initiative grant from the US Department of Defense, she served as the director of graduate studies for the David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies at BYU for eight years, and served as Vice President of the International Studies Association for 2011-2012. Hudson is one of the Principal Investigators of the WomanStats Project, which includes the largest compilation of data on the status of women in the world today. She is also a founding editor of SquareTwo, a founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis, and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. She has testified before Congress on three occasions, is president of the Utah Valley Institute of Cystic Fibrosis, and co-founded the LDS National Security Society. Her recent books include Sex and World Peace, co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad Emmett, The Hillary Doctrine, co-authored with Patricia Leidl, and The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide,co-authored with Donna Lee Bowen and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen, all three published by Columbia University Press. She and her husband David, an artist and landscape architect, are the parents of eight children.
Hanna Seariac is a MA student in Greek and Latin at Brigham Young University. She has interests in the interaction that the Greek New Testament has with the Septuagint as well as sacrifice in ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome. She works as a research assistant on a biblical commentary and as a research assistant on early Latter-day Saint history. She values Jesus Christ, family, friends, hiking, baking, and good ice cream.
Hanna Seariac is a MA student in Greek and Latin at Brigham Young University. She is writing a book on the history of the priesthood and another one that responds systematically to anti-LDS literature. She works as a research assistant on a biblical commentary and as a producer on a news show. She values Jesus Christ, family, friends, hiking, baking, and really good ice cream.
Elizabeth Kuehn received her Bachelor of Arts in History from Arizona State University and her Masters of Arts from Purdue University in History, with a focus on religious history and women and gender studies in early modern European history. She entered a doctoral program in History at the University of California, Irvine, and became a PhD candidate there in 2011.
Angela Hallstrom works for the Church History Department as a writer and literary editor for the four-volume history of the Church, Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. Prior to her work for the Church History Department, she taught writing at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She received an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and is the author of the novel Bound on Earth, editor of the short fiction collection Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction, and has served on the editorial boards of BYU Studies, Irreantum, and Segullah. She and her husband are the parents of four children, and recently moved back to Utah after spending sixteen years in Minnesota.
A native of southern California, Daniel C. Peterson received a bachelor’s degree in Greek and philosophy from Brigham Young University (BYU) and, after several years of study in Jerusalem and Cairo, earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Peterson is a professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at BYU, where he has taught Arabic language and literature at all levels, Islamic philosophy, Islamic culture and civilization, Islamic religion, the Qur’an, the introductory and senior “capstone” courses for Middle Eastern Studies majors, and various other occasional specialized classes. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Islamic and Latter-day Saint topics–including a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God (Eerdmans, 2007)—and has lectured across the United States, in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and at various Islamic universities in the Near East and Asia. He served in the Switzerland Zürich Mission (1972-1974), and, for approximately eight years, on the Gospel Doctrine writing committee for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also presided for a time as the bishop of a singles ward adjacent to Utah Valley University. Dr. Peterson is married to the former Deborah Stephens, of Lakewood, Colorado, and they are the parents of three sons.