Inouye grew up in
Costa Mesa, California. She was a fourth-generation Chinese-Japanese American.[1] Her Chinese great-grandfather, Gin Gor Ju, came to the United States from
Guangdong province and settled in
Utah. Her father's family was originally from Japan. Her father's parents, Bessie Shizuko Murakami Inouye and Charles Ichiro Inouye, met and married in a World War II-era Japanese internment in
Heart Mountain, Wyoming.[2]
Education
In 2003, she graduated magna cum laude in East Asian studies from Harvard College, delivering the Harvard Oration at the class day graduation exercises.[3] She received a
PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from
Harvard University in 2011. While researching and writing her dissertation, Miraculous Mundane: The True Jesus Church and Chinese Christianity in the Twentieth Century, she lived in
Xiamen, China, and was an affiliate of the
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences from 2009 to 2010. She served as an associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review and as a frequent contributor on topics of religion.[4][5] In 2019, she had her book China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church published by
Oxford University Press.
Personal life
Inouye was married and had four children. She lived in California, Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Massachusetts, Utah, and New Zealand.[6] She was a member of the LDS Church and served as a
missionary for the church in
Taiwan. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017 and died on April 23, 2024.[7]
Publications
Inouye, M. (2018). "Speaking in the Devil’s Tongue? The True Jesus Church’s Uneasy Rhetorical Accommodation to Maoism, 1948–1958." ModernChina, 44(6), 1–31. 10.1177/0097700418763557
Inouye, M. (2018). "Tale of Three Primaries: Critical Mass in Mormonism’s Informal Institutions." In G. Colvin, J. Brooks (eds.) Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (pp. 229–262). Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press.
Inouye, M. (2017). "Charismatic Crossings: The Transnational, Transdenominational Friendship of Bernt Berntsen and Wei Enbo." In F. Yang, J. Tong, A. Anderson (eds.) Global Chinese Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (pp. 91–117). Leiden: Brill.
Inouye, M. (2017). "Charismatic Moderns: Pluralistic Discourse within Chinese Protestant Communities, 1905–1926." Twentieth-Century China, 42(1), 26–51. 10.1353/tcc.2017.0006
Inouye, M. (2016). "A Religious Rhetoric of Competing Modernities: Christian Print Culture in Late Qing China." In G. Song (ed.) Reshaping the Boundaries: The Christian Intersection of China and the West in the Modern Era (pp. 106–122). Hong Kong:
University of Hong Kong Press.
Inouye, M. (2016). Culture and Agency in Mormon Women’s Lives. In
Kate Holbrook, M. Bowman (eds.) Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (pp. 230–246). Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press.
Inouye, M. (2015). "Miraculous Modernity: Charismatic Traditions and Trajectories within Chinese Protestant Christianity." In V. Goossaert, J. Kiely, J. Lagerwey (eds.) Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850–2015 (pp. 884–919). Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. 10.1163/9789004304642_023
Inouye, M. (2014). "The Oak and the Banyan: The ‘Glocalization’ of Mormon Studies." Mormon Studies Review, 1, 70–79.
Bibliography
Sacred Struggle: Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance (Deseret Book, 2023)
ISBN1639931872
China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 2019)
ISBN978-0190923464
Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer, and Motherhood (Not Necessarily in That Order) (Maxwell Institute, 2019)
ISBN9781944394806
Awards
2019
AML Award for creative nonfiction, Crossings: A Bald Asian American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar’s Ventures through Life, Death, Cancer, and Motherhood (Not Necessarily in That Order)