Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

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Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard University
Occupation(s)Senior Lecturer, Historian
EmployerUniversity of Auckland
Known forChina and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church
Children4

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye was a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Auckland. She was an expert in the social and cultural history of modern China, charismatic global Christianity, and women and religion.

Early life[edit]

Inouye grew up in Costa Mesa, California. She was a fourth-generation Chinese-Japanese American.[1] Her Chinese great-grandfather, Gin Gor Ju, came to the United States from Guangdong province and settled in Utah. Her father's family was originally from Japan. Her father's parents, Bessie Shizuko Murakami Inouye and Charles Ichiro Inouye, met and married in a World War II-era Japanese internment in Heart Mountain, Wyoming.[2]

Education[edit]

In 2003 she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian studies from Harvard College, delivering the Harvard Oration at the class day graduation exercises.[3] She received her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 2011. While researching and writing her dissertation, Miraculous Mundane: The True Jesus Church and Chinese Christianity in the Twentieth Century, she lived in Xiamen, China, and was an affiliate of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences from 2009 to 2010. She served as an associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review and as a frequent contributor on topics of religion.[4][5] In 2019 she had her book China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church published by Oxford University Press.

Personal life[edit]

Inouye was married and had four children. She lived in California, Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Massachusetts, Utah and New Zealand.[6] She was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served an LDS mission in Taiwan. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017, and passed away on April 23, 2024.[7]

Publications[edit]

  • Inouye, M. W. (2018). Speaking in the Devil’s Tongue? The True Jesus Church’s Uneasy Rhetorical Accommodation to Maoism, 1948–1958. Modern China, 44 (6), 1-31. 10.1177/0097700418763557
  • Inouye, M. W. (2018). Tale of Three Primaries: Critical Mass in Mormonism’s Informal Institutions. In G. Colvin, J. Brooks (Eds.) Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (pp. 229–262). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
  • Inouye, M. (2017). Charismatic crossings: The transnational, transdenominational friendship of Bernt Berntsen and Wei Enbo. In F. Yang, J. Tong, A. Anderson (Eds.) Global Chinese pentecostal and charismatic christianity (pp. 91–117). Leiden: Brill.
  • Inouye, M. (2017). Charismatic moderns: Pluralistic discourse within Chinese protestant communities, 1905–1926. Twentieth-Century China, 42 (1), 26-51. 10.1353/tcc.2017.0006
  • Inouye, M. (2016). A religious rhetoric of competing modernities: Christian print culture in late Qing China. In G. Song (Ed.) Reshaping the boundaries: the Christian intersection of China and the West in the modern era (pp. 106–122). Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press.
  • Inouye, M. (2016). Culture and agency in Mormon women’s lives. In Kate Holbrook, M. Bowman (Eds.) Women and mormonism: Historical and contemporary perspectives (pp. 230–246). Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press.
  • Inouye, M.-T. (2015). Miraculous modernity: Charismatic traditions and trajectories within Chinese protestant christianity. In V. Goossaert, J. Kiely, J. Lagerwey (Eds.) Modern Chinese religion II: 1850-2015 (pp. 884–919). Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. 10.1163/9789004304642_023
  • Inouye, M. W. (2014). The Oak and the Banyan: the ‘Glocalization’ of Mormon Studies. Mormon Studies Review, 1, 70-79.

Bibliography[edit]

  • China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 2019) ISBN 978-0190923464
  • Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer, and Motherhood (Not Necessarily in that Order) (Maxwell Institute, 2019) ISBN 9781944394806

Awards[edit]

  • 2019 AML Award for Creative Nonfiction, Crossings: A bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar’s ventures through life, death, cancer, and motherhood (not necessarily in that order)

References[edit]

  1. ^ Hales, Laura. "The Global Church and Lived Religion with Melissa Inouye", Latter-day Saint Perspectives, 14 August 2019. Retrieved on 14 August 2019.
  2. ^ Pimentel, Annette. "All the women should be there", Mormon Women Project, Utah, 25 April 2017. Retrieved on 7 August 2019.
  3. ^ "Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye", FairMormon, Utah, January 2012. Retrieved on 7 August 2019.
  4. ^ Inouye, Melissa. "Mormonism isn’t like a string of Christmas lights", Washington Post, 18 June 2012. Retrieved on 7 August 2019.
  5. ^ Walker, Joseph. "LDS similar to other faiths in need for both reason, belief", Deseret Book, 22 June 2012. Retrieved on 7 August 2019.
  6. ^ "‘Mormon Land’: LDS scholar Melissa Inouye on building a truly global religion and addressing gender issues in church culture", The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah, 12 June 2019. Retrieved on 7 August 2019.
  7. ^ "Courageous LDS scholar whose life and writings exemplified — and expounded on — earthly struggles dies at 44", The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah, 23 April 2024. Retrieved on 23 April 2024.

External links[edit]

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