This morning, Mormon studies scholar Dr. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye passed away after a years-long struggle with cancer. Melissa was an amazing scholar, fantastic mentor, and just great person, and I think a lot of people—even just those who knew her professionally—are going to be spending time writing, thinking, and crying about her today and in the weeks to come. Other people will have more, and more important, things to say than I do, but I’m deeply grateful for Melissa, and I want to show that gratitude by sharing a few thoughts of my own.

Melissa was generous

I met Melissa in Bordeaux, France, at the 2019 Global Mormon Studies conference. I had finished my PhD in Educational Technology less than a year before, and I was seeing what kinds of transdisciplinary work I could apply my social media methods to now that I had a not-strictly-education position in a School of Information Science. I was working on a paper on Mormon Twitter—which I’d wanted to write about since starting Twitter work—and when I heard about the GMS conference, I figured I could find a professional excuse to visit France again. I did a little geolocation magic on the dataset I was already working on, took a look at how international Mormons participated in live-tweeting during a big semi-annual church conference, and got my way into the conference.

There aren’t a lot of assistant professors of information communication technology in Mormon Studies, and there certainly weren’t at this GMS conference. Melissa had some great critiques of my research, but given my job title, she also had a question for me. Did I know anything about WordPress, and would I be willing to do some work for the GMS organization sprucing up their website over the summer? I did, and I was, and that’s how I started to get involved with the Global Mormon Studies network beyond using their conference as an excuse to visit Bordeaux. Within a few months, I was the organization’s web admin, and a year or so later, Melissa asked if I would be interested in being a member of the steering committee for the organization. Mormon Studies is made up of small, plucky organizations where junior faculty members can step into roles that they couldn’t in larger, better-funded fields, and I learned a lot from working with GMS.

I stepped down from the GMS steering committee last year, but that was to take up a leadership position in the Mormon Social Science Association (including doing web work for their journal). MSSA is a better fit for my research (I’m interested in international Mormonism, but my Mormon Studies work doesn’t really fit the description), but I don’t know that I ever would have made my way to MSSA or leadership in that organization if GMS hadn’t been validating of my efforts to make (or even fake) my way into Mormon Studies. As I think about my career post tenure, I want to spend more time doing work on online Mormonism, and I think there are lots of opportunities to be involved in MSSA in the years to come. In a very real sense, I owe this part of my career to Melissa, who offered me a job less than 24 hours after she met me.

Melissa was kind

Mormon Studies is a field in which personal and professional interests in Mormonism overlap really easily. Sometimes, this crosses lines: I’ve been at conferences where believers have gotten inappropriately apologetic in their scholarly presentations and where disaffected Mormons have let personal criticisms overpower theoretical and empirical foundations. Other times, though, it just can’t be helped. One evening during the GMS 2019 conference, a bunch of us headed over to a local, Beatles-themed crêperie and had dinner there. The conversation there turned to Mormonism in a personal sense, and we had lots of interesting talks over our meal. At that time, my family was going through a transition period with our relationship to the faith. I didn’t have a lot of people to talk about that with, and at least one of my comments during the night ended up being embarrassingly mansplain-y to another conference attendee.

I wince whenever I think back on that moment, but as the whole-table conversation split back up into smaller ones, she kindly followed up on what I had said, asked me about my family, and gave me and my experience the kind of validation that I needed in that moment even though I’m not quite sure I had earned it in that moment. In the years that followed, I never really had other chances to talk to Melissa on personal topics (all of our other conversations were during work meetings), but that one moment made a lot of difference to me during a time that I was experiencing a lot of stress.

Of course, Melissa could be just as kind in our professional interactions. She was the kind of colleague who always talked up your skills and thanked you for your contributions. She once used the phrase “rad skills” in a meeting agenda to talk about the web work I was doing for GMS, she was effusive in her thanks when I set up all the tech infrastructure for the GMS 2023 first-ever online conference, and when I pinged the GMS listserv less than three weeks ago to let them know that the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association was now hosting the archives of the defunct International Journal of Mormon Studies, she responded to the listserv to say how “So cool!” that was, even though she could have easily asked why I hadn’t done the same project for the GMS website (arguably a better fit) a few years earlier instead of only thinking about it once I’d joined up with the MSSA. I felt embarrassed about that last part and didn’t respond to her email off-list like I could have. It’s the last time I had any interaction with her, and now I regret leaving that hanging.

Melissa was fun

Melissa took her work very seriously—she was a passionate and indefatigable advocate for moving Mormon Studies beyond the religion’s home turf. Yet, she also knew how to have fun. Conversations with her were low-key, self-effacing, and full of jokes (I remember her seeming glee at having been “disemboweled” after a surgery for colon cancer). We had more than a few conversations while planning the GMS 2023 Conference, and she brought fun into all of them—and in multiple ways. One afternoon, I let her know that I’d give her a call after making dinner; when I called, she insisted on asking what I’d made for dinner before we got to any of the conference logistics. As we set up the conference, she took with gusto to the Slack that I’d created, making sure that just because we were doing an online conference, we weren’t getting rid of any of the hallway jokes, informal conversations, or camaraderie that would have been present in a face-to-face conversations.

My favorite example of Melissa’s having fun is when she tasked me with checking the security of our Zoom room before having an online business meeting in the Summer of 2020. It was the first time the organization had ever done a business meeting on Zoom, and we’d all heard the stories about Zoombombing and everything else. So, in a steering committee meeting shortly before, Melissa charged me with somehow getting a picture of Pikachu into the meeting. She would lock down chat, screen sharing, and everything else that she could think of to dissuade a Zoombomber, but my little “white hat” job was to see if there was something that we hadn’t thought of. It was a good plan, but what really made it fun was Melissa’s insistence that I use Pokémon as a security testing technique. I did manage to succeed in my task: Melissa had flipped all the right switches, but I correctly guessed that I could change my Zoom profile to Pikachu mid-meeting and then cut my camera to get the picture to show up for all the other viewers. In my memory, though, Melissa had a huge grin on her face even in defeat, though. She was so much fun to be around.

I’m going to miss Melissa

For all that I worked with Melissa, I didn’t know her terribly well, and it feels almost presumptuous to say I have this much to write after her passing. Yet, she’s had an outsized influence on my life and career, and I’m really going to miss her. I’ll miss her when I bike commute, remembering that she commuted longer (and without the help of an e-bike) to her job at the University of Auckland. I’ll miss her when I run, wondering if I’ll ever do one marathon, much less the several that she did. I’ll miss her when I work on a WordPress site for a Mormon Studies organization, knowing that it’s thanks to her when I broke into the field. I’ll miss her when I try to be as generous, and kind, and fun in my work as she always was in hers. If I miss her this much as someone who was only in the same physical place as her for a few days several years ago, I can’t imagine how many more people are going to miss her even more. What a magnificent person Melissa was.

• macro
• Work
• Mormon Studies
• Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
• Mormon Twitter
• online Mormonism
• France
• WordPress
• Pokémon