Millie Tullis Receives 2022 Elaine J. Lawless Graduate Student Travel Award

The winner of the 2022 Elaine J. Lawless Travel Award, which is sponsored by the Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section, is Millie Tullis (Utah State University). The award is given to an outstanding graduate student to enable travel to the AFS annual meeting to present their work in person.

Millie’s paper, “Love Magic among the Mormons: The Legacy of the Logan Peepstone Woman” is based on her thesis research on Utah women Mormon diviners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who practiced love magic and the finding of lost objects (including livestock) by looking into “peep stones.” Her original research in archives and through interviews with descendants of these practitioners is described by Tullis’s advisor, Jeannie B. Thomas, as “innovative and exhilarating…She is exceptional, and her research will make significant contributions to religious folklife studies and gender studies…She is simply outstanding as a scholar, folklorist, and human being.”

We congratulate Millie on this award and look forward to future publication of her research which breaks ground while continuing on the path of Elaine J. Lawless’s outstanding work in religious folklife and gender studies.