Bio

Daniel Watkins hails from the east coast of Florida. He received a B.A. in History and Religion from the University of Florida in 2005. After spending the better part of a year in California taking classes at Fuller Theological Seminary and the University of California Santa Barbara, he returned to the University of Florida where he worked with Professor Howard Louthan on an M.A. in Early Modern European History. His Masters project focused on Pierre de l’Estoile, the politique chronicler of the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion. Upon receiving his M.A. in 2008, he moved to Columbus, Ohio to join the doctoral program at The Ohio State University.

For six years, Daniel worked under the tutelage of Professor Dale K. Van Kley on research in the religious history of eighteenth-century France. In 2011-2012, he spent a fellowship year in Europe researching in archives throughout the Île-de-France, other French departments, England, and Italy. When he returned to the United States, he spent the following two years teaching sections of introductory-level history courses and completing his dissertation. He also published his first journal article, “Religion and Trade through Jesuit Eyes,” in World History Connected. Daniel received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History in 2014.

After getting his doctorate, Daniel returned to Florida as an assistant professor of History at the University of North Florida (Jacksonville, FL). He taught on a wide range of topics including absolutism in early modern Europe, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, modern France, the history of Christianity, religious conflict, and the “craft of the historian.” He also published “The Two Conversions of François de La Pillonnière” in Eighteenth-Century Thought and his first book review in the Journal of Church and State. The faculty at UNF also introduced Daniel to digital humanities scholarship. Along with the graduate students in his Enlightenment Europe seminar, he began his first digitization project, “Unheard Voices of the Enlightenment,” a project that was cut short by his move to Baylor University in the fall of 2017.

At Baylor, Daniel has continued to teach courses on early modern and modern France, world history, the United States in global perspective, and historical methods. He has sustained an active scholarly agenda, publishing book reviews, essays, articles, a co-edited volume with Professor Mita Choudhury, and a monograph with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Since 2020, he has expanded his digital research through the completion of Baylor University’s Data Scholar Program, a three-month Fundamentals in Data Research fellowship, and a fellowship from Gale and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In 2023, he is launching two new digital projects, “The Digital Lettres édifiantes et curieuses” and “Mapping Early Modern Missionary Letters.”

Daniel has presented at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the American Society for Church History, the Society for French Historical Studies, the American Catholic Historical Association, the Western Society for French History, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He has won fellowships and research grants from Stanford University, the Newberry Library, The Ohio State University, the University of North Florida, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland at Galway, and Baylor University.

He is currently researching the impact of missionary letters on the early modern public sphere. He lives in Waco, Texas with his family.