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David Smilde (born September 23, 1966) is an American sociologist and the Charles A and Leo M Favrot Professor at Tulane University, and Senior Fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. He is known for his contributions to the sociology of religion and scholarship and advocacy around Venezuela’s political crisis.

Career
Smilde graduated from Calvin College with a BA in philosophy and sociology in 1989 and received his MA in 1994 and PhD in 2000 from the University of Chicago. He completed his dissertation under Wendy Griswold. In 1995, he received a Fulbright-Hays dissertation fellowship and in 2006 was named a Fulbright Scholar to teach at the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

From 2011 to 2018, he was editor-in-chief of the journal Qualitative Sociology. From 2015 to 2018, he was a part of the International Panel on Social Progress and co-authored the report’s chapter on religion.

In 2012, he founded the blog Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights and curated it for the Washington Office on Latin America until 2020. From 2010-2012, he was chair of the Venezuelan Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. He is the program co-chair of the 2023 Latin American Studies Association Congress in Vancouver. He has been a residential fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, in 2001 and 2020.

Contributions
His 2007 book Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism won the 2008 Best Book Award in the Sociology of Religion section of the American Sociological Association. He has also won best article awards from the Sociology of Religion Section and the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

He became an important voice advocating for democracy in Venezuela, frequently commenting in the media and writing numerous opinion articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, and El País. In March 2017, he testified in a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Venezuela, advocating against sanctions. His Venezuela advocacy has been criticized from the right and the left. In the Venezuelan blog Caracas Chronicles, Juan Cristobal Nagel criticized Smilde’s analysis saying it “passing off government propaganda as cold analysis under the veneer of impartiality." In Jacobin, Daniel Finn argued that Smilde criticizes the possibility of military intervention but is simply advocating "for intervention of a different kind."

Works

 * Smilde, David, Veronica Zubillaga and Rebecca Hanson (eds.). 2022. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Crime and Revolution. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
 * Smilde, David and Hugo Pérez Hernáiz (eds.). 2021. Postsecularismo y la religion vivida: aportes desde la sociología cualitativa norteamericana. (Edited volume with 12 peer-reviewed Qualitative Sociology articles translated into Spanish, and an original introduction). Caracas: abediciones, Universidad Católica ÁndresBello Press.
 * Bender, Courtney, Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt and David Smilde (eds). 2012. Religion on the Edge: Decentering and Recentering the Sociology of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
 * Smilde, David and Daniel Hellinger (eds). 2011. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics and Culture in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
 * Smilde, David. 2007. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 * López Maya, Margarita, David Smilde, and Keta Stephany. 2002. Protesta y Cultura en Venezuela: Los Marcos de Acción Colectiva en 1999. Caracas: FACES-UCV / CENDES / FONACIT.