About

Brubaker has lived outside the United States for extended periods three times (Spain, Japan, and the U.K.), and has traveled extensively. 

In addition to ordinary travel, his particular work and studies combined with a general confidence and willingness to ask questions has opened doors in many places that others cannot go. He has ventured off the beaten path in places like Cairo, Tashkent, Samarkand, Beirut, Jerusalem, Warsaw, Tokyo, Manila, New Delhi, Suva, Madrid, Paris, Seoul, St. Petersburg, London, Istanbul, Prague, Budapest, Hong Kong, and others. He has stepped into North Korea, climbed Mt. Fuji, slept in grass huts in Fiji, wandered through mosques and Islamic colleges in Uzbekistan, Kuwait, Amman, and elsewhere, speaking with imams and others. He has spent many days in the libraries of Oxford, Cambridge, the reading rooms of the British Library, among others.

Daniel has run about a dozen marathons including Chicago, London, New York, Seattle, Boston and Washington D.C., with a best time of 3:03:23. In Tokyo, Japan in 1989, he set a school record for the 2-mile distance that stood until 2017. 

As a child in Madrid, Spain, Daniel had training in sculpture and other media. As a young man, he worked as a ski instructor for children, and as a seafood counter worker in grocery store. At university, he earned degrees in Cell and Molecular Biology (B.S.) and Speech Communication (B.A.), then working various jobs from bookkeeper, to microbiology assistant, to staff at McDonalds (twice, but never in the United States). For seven years, Daniel worked for Nordstrom in sales, management, and human resources; then as a personal banker for Wells Fargo.

Dr. Brubaker loves cultures and interactions with all kinds of people. His 1996 marriage to Latha Samuel, the granddaughter of Pastor P.K. Chacko on her mother’s side and Pastor K.J. Samuel on her father’s, formally brought him into an Indian family; Daniel made his first trip to Kerala with Latha in 1997 and the two returned with their three children in 2015.

When a freshman in college at the University of Washington, Daniel used elective credits to take a year-long course on Islam. During this time he was first introduced in a substantial way to the history and texts of Islam and was also able to visit the local mosque where his professor served as an imam.

Several years after the events of September 11, 2001, a longtime friend who had known him during college years encouraged Daniel to pursue a Ph.D. in Islam. Daniel began studying Arabic and applying to Ph.D. programs, and was offered a full scholarship at Rice University in Houston. 

Daniel’s interest was captured by Quran manuscript studies during his Ph.D. work and settled on a project that focused upon collecting and describing physical corrections. His doctoral dissertation was principally a database of Quran manuscript changes; in it he collected photographs, and noted shelf marks, institution, folio, side, line, transcription, modern text, and many other features, one-by-one, for corrections he discovered in these manuscripts.

In 2019, Brubaker traveled to Dundee, Scotland, delivering a public lecture at an Islamic college, followed by more manuscript research at universities in the U.K. Soon after, he joined an archeological team in Jerusalem, where he also toured and photographed the interior of the Dome of the Rock and the areas inside and under the Aqsa Mosque and the rest of the southern part of the Temple Mount. Following this trip, he presented a paper on his manuscript work in Warsaw after vacationing with his family in Italy. The year drew to a close with his presentation of another conference paper at the International Quranic Studies Association in San Diego.

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