Jan Shipps is professor emeritus of history and religious studies at IUPUI, and research associate at The Polis Center. She is generally regarded as the foremost non-Mormon scholar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Her first book on the subject was Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition published the University of Illinois Press. Recently, Illinois published her book Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons, in which she interweaves her own history of Mormon-watching with 16 essays on Mormon history and culture. She is now at work on a book with the working title Religion in Mid-sized Cities.