Daniel Genkins

Mellon Assistant Professor of History and Digital Humanities

Daniel Genkins a historian of the early modern Atlantic World and a dedicated practitioner of the digital humanities. His historical research focuses on imperial competition and cooperation in the seventeenth-century Caribbean as well as the transatlantic slave trade. He is particularly interested in the application of digital techniques to advance and add value to research in the humanities.

Genkins serves as the Executive Director of Vanderbilt’s Slave Societies Digital Archive, in which capacity he mentors undergraduate and graduate students, manages day-to-day operations, and leads the technical aspects of the project. His work on SSDA currently focuses on using data science and associated techniques, most notably machine learning, to extract detailed information from images of historical records and make that data searchable in order to make digital archives more accessible and useful to scholars and the interested public.

Genkins completed his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt in 2018 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library before returning to Nashville to work on SSDA. He teaches courses in Atlantic history as well as the digital humanities.