Prof. David J. Collins, S.J., is proud of having grown up "inside the beltway," but in the twenty years between his high school graduation and his arrival at Georgetown he has lived and worked in Philadelphia, Boston, Munich, and Chicago, among many fascinating places. Prof. Collins entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order) in 1987 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1998. Shortly after earning his doctorate in medieval history at Northwestern University, he returned to DC in 2004 to join the History Department at Georgetown University. Prof. Collins served as the chair of the university's Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in 2015/16 and continues working on this project for the university and the Jesuit order.
Prof. Collins is an intellectual historian of the late medieval and early modern Europe. He has published extensively on the cult of the saints, Renaissance humanism, and learned magic. His most recent monograph, Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Univ Pr, 2024), examines the life of Albert the Great (a thirteenth-century Dominican friar and the famed teacher of Thomas Aquinas), his writings about magic, a centuries-long debate over whether he practiced magic, and why that debate matters in the history of science and religion.
Prof. Collins also recently published The Jesuits in the United States: A Concise History (Georgetown Univ Pr, 2023), a primer of Jesuit activities in colonial North America and the US to the present day.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Associate Professor, College - Department of History