David Harrington Watt is the Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies.  

The courses he teaches include: "Exclusion, Inclusion, and the U. S. Academy," "Quakers, War, Slavery, and Freedom;"  "Reinventing Quakerism: Haverford College, Rufus Jones, and the Rise of Liberal Quakerism;" and "Ethical Struggles in Catastrophic Times: Quakers' Responses to the Holocaust."  His current research focuses on Liberal Christianity, twentieth-century pacifism, and history of the Society of Friends in the years between 1937 and 2018.

Watt's articles and books include: The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830-1937 (to be published in 2023 by Penn State University Press, co-edited with Stephen Angell and Ben Pink Dandelion);  "Eugenicists, Quakers, and Rufus Jones, 1893-1938;" "Henry Cadbury, the Peace Testimony, and the First World War" (co-authored with James Krippner); Antifundamentalism in Modern America (Cornell University Press, 2017); Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History (published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2014, co-edited with Simon Wood); Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (Oxford University Press, 2002); and A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism (Rutgers University Press, 1991).

In collaboration with Laura Levitt and Tracy Fessenden, Watt edits a series, North American Religions, for NYU Press.  More than twenty-five authors have written books for the series; the books explore topics such as lived religion, popular religious movements, religion and social power, religion and cultural reproduction, and the relationship between secular and religious practices.

Over the course of his career, Watt's work has been supported by the Council of Independent Colleges, the Fulbright Scholars Program, Harvard University, Haverford College, the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism, the Lilly Endowment, the Louisville Institute, Princeton University, Temple University, and the University of Chicago.   He received a PhD from Harvard University and an AB from Berkeley.  Watt grew up in the American South and in deserts of Southern California.