Meet our Team
Joseph Stuart is a historian of race, religion, and masculinity in twentieth-century Black freedom movements. He teaches at Brigham Young University, where he is an Assistant Professor of History and affiliate faculty in Africana Studies, American Studies, and Global Women’s Studies. His forthcoming book, A Religion for Black Men in America: The Nation of Islam against Jim Crow’s Empire, examines why some Black Americans rejected integration as a path forward.
His work has appeared in Church History, Zygon, the Journal of Mormon History, and Religion & Politics. He is also a research associate with the Century of Black Mormons Project. He has spent time on the other side of the microphone, hosting and producing podcasts for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute and the New Books Network, proof that he can make deep archival work sound like a good conversation instead of a lecture.
Joseph has taught everyone from beginning history majors to genealogists at RootsTech. He lives with his family in Saratoga Springs, Utah, where he spends his free time hiking with his kids and developing historically informed grievances about college football.
Diahan Southard has been in genetic genealogy since before it was really an industry — starting at the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, where she helped build the first genetic genealogy database, then moving to GeneTree, one of the earliest direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies. She helped launch the first genetic genealogy consulting practice not long after, and in 2013 founded Your DNA Guide, now the most comprehensive educational resource for people learning to use DNA in their family history research.
Diahan is a featured speaker at RootsTech, the largest family history conference in the world, and has lectured everywhere from London to Burbank, from Amsterdam to Dallas — making audiences all over the world believe that they can do the DNA. She hosted the PBS special Your DNA Secrets Revealed, and has written three books: Your DNA Guide — The Book, Twenty-Five Years: A History of Genetic Genealogy, and a collection of her Monday Minutes — the weekly essays people still bring up to her at conferences, sometimes before they mention DNA at all.
Through Your DNA Guide, she's taught more than 10,000 courses to students in over 40 countries, given away more than 300,000 free DNA education resources, and built a community of thousands of genealogists who've stopped being intimidated by their DNA results and started asking better questions of them.
Diahan can still do a perfect cartwheel, is married to the best man in the world, and has three kids who are, in her words, rocking the adulting thing.
About this project
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