Kate Holbrook
Kate Holbrook was the managing historian for women’s history at the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In 2011, she was hired by the Church History Department as a women’s history specialist. In an interview with the Deseret News, Holbrook said, "History needs to be told in a way that integrates what men were doing with what women were doing."
She earned her Master of Divinity degree in world religions from Harvard Divinity School. She held a PhD in religion and society from Boston University.
She received fellowships and grants for her academic work from Harvard University, Boston University, Brigham Young University, and the Roothbert Fellowship. She also received the first Eccles Fellowship in Mormon Studies at the University of Utah to examine the foodways of American religious groups.
Holbrook was voted Harvard College’s Teaching Fellow of the Year for her work in a course that enrolled nearly six hundred students, and she co-edited Global Values 101: A Short Course, based on that class.
She was the editor of (with Jennifer Reeder) At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, (with Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, and Jennifer Reeder) The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History, and (with Matthew Bowman) Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. She has also published book chapters with Oxford and Columbia university presses.
Holbrook took part in a 2018 Face to Face event in Nauvoo, Illinois, with Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and fellow Church historian Matt Grow, where they took questions about many different topics about Church history.
In a statement on August 22, 2022, Elder Cook said four years after the Face-to-Face event, he is often approached by people who remember it. “And many, many times, they comment on Kate and what her words on the stage — and who she is and what she represents — have influenced them in their own lives and helped solidify their own faith.”[1]
She was born on January 13, 1972, in Santa Barbara, California, and raised in Provo, Utah, by her mother and grandmother. She served as a missionary in the Russia Samara Mission. She and her husband, Sam Brown, have three children.
Holbrook died on August 20, 2022, at the age of 50 from a rare form of eye cancer.
Her family shared in her obituary: "Kate loved Jesus with her whole heart. There wasn’t a part of her that didn’t breathe God and Gospel. She was honored to lead teams to tell the story of the Latter-day Saints to outsiders and the stories of women to her fellow Saints."[2]
