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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 has focused primarily on Protestants in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and particularly on issues relating to evangelical Christianity, commercial culture, and institutionally-situated religious practice and discourse.
A recent research project illustrated, for example, how the late-nineteenth century's "Social Gospel," a movement often cast as the classic example of religious opposition to business, in fact drew upon the era's emerging business logics and practices. Other recent projects situated the discourse of "world religions" within disputes between Unitarian clergy, and explored how assumptions about the relationship between books and ideas have led many historians to overlook not only the context of book production and reception but also the logics that structured those processes. Daniel's dissertation will focus on the history of the evangelical book publishing industry in the twentieth century.
Helping edit and develop The Immanent Frame (http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/)--the Social Science Research Council's acclaimed blog on religion, secularism, and the public sphere--Daniel has organized scholarly conversations on such issues as how people understand and apply the "evangelical" category. In addition to helping coordinate SSRC conferences and workshops, Daniel is co-organizing the department of religion's 2009 graduate student conference. Devoted to reexamining the concept of "belief," the conference will explore various modes of believing and belonging, the legal and intellectual development of those modes, the rhetorical and tactical use of beliefs by groups and governments to legitimate their practices and policies, and other issues.
Daniel came to Columbia after receiving degrees in religion from the College of William and Mary and Cambridge University.
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