Ronald K. Esplin

Ronald K. Esplin is a historian and is a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers project. He is the former director of The Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. He served as the project’s managing editor until 2012.

Esplin was born in 1944 in Cedar City, Utah, and reared in Salt Lake City. He holds history degrees from the University of Utah, the University of Virginia, and Brigham Young University. He was recruited to work for the summer under Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington doing a search and study of Brigham Young’s papers in the church archive. From 1972 until 1980, he was part of the History Division of the Historical Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with assignments both as a researcher and writer and as an archivist. When the History Division was transferred to BYU in 1980, he to become part of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. From 1986 through 2002, he served as managing director of that research institute and as a professor of church history and doctrine.

From 1988 to 1991, he served as one of the editors for Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Most of his publications have involved Brigham Young and early Utah or pre-Utah Latter-day Saint history, including Men with a Mission: The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the British Isles, 1837–1841. Many of them also concern Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint leadership. He served as president of the Mormon History Association from 2006 to 2007.