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| Student Biography |
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Daniel Vaca |
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Biography
Daniel Vaca is a doctoral student in American religious history and culture. His work focuses primarily on the histories and practices of American Protestants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and particularly on issues relating to evangelical Christianity, commercial culture, print history, and institutionally-situated practice and discourse.
Focusing on the history of evangelical book publishing and reading in the twentieth-century United States, Daniel's dissertation helps explain not only how evangelical books became bestsellers but also how the "evangelical" public came into being. Other research projects have situated late-nineteenth century Protestant social reform within emerging business culture, have traced out nineteenth-century evangelical media networks, and have contextualized the development of the category of "religion" within Unitarian denominational infighting.
A research assistant for the Social Science Research Council, Daniel is a regular contributor to here & there at The Immanent Frame, where he has helped organize scholarly conversations on such issues as how people understand and apply the "evangelical" category. Daniel currently is assisting the SSRC with a research initiative that traces the genealogy of "spirituality" as a concept distinct from "religion." In addition to his work with the SSRC, Daniel co-organized the Department of Religion's 2009 graduate student conference. Devoted to reexamining the concept of "belief," the conference explored such issues as the role of law and government in structuring modes of believing and belonging as well as the rhetorical and tactical use of beliefs by individuals or groups.
Daniel came to Columbia after receiving degrees in religion from the College of William and Mary and Cambridge University.
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