Daniel Vaca teaches in the Department of Religious Studies, where his research and teaching explore histories of religion and culture in North America, focusing especially on relationships between religious and economic activity in the United States. His first book, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard, 2019), traces the history of the evangelical book industry and its audience since the end of the nineteenth century, exploring how evangelical theological preoccupations, racial divisions, cultural identities, and institutional alliances have taken shape through commercial strategy and corporate initiative. The book received the Modern Language Association’s honorable mention for the 2020 Matei Calinescu Prize for “distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth- or twentieth-first-century literature and thought.”
His current research focuses on the religious history of taxes and taxation in the United States. Recognizing that taxation continually has been a primary site of political, economic, and moral conflict, this project explores how Americans have come to understand what taxes are and what they do. Research projects related to this book have examined topics such as poverty, charity, and the ideal of efficiency in American religious history. During the 2020-2021 academic year, he worked on this project as a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, as part of its workshop on Religion and Public Life in North America.
From 2015-2022, Vaca was the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's Religion and Economy program unit and served as the associate editor of "A Universe of Terms," a collection of essays on key concepts in the study of religion and secularism published on the Social Science Research Council's digital publication The Immanent Frame.
