For thirty-seven years, David Emil Mungello edited a scholarly journal devoted to Chinese and Western historical scholarship. Mungello, a historian who spent his career tracing how Confucian philosophy reached Enlightenment Europe and how Christianity reached Ming and Qing China, died on July 4, 2026. He was 82.

He was born November 20, 1943, in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, to Lois Louise Dittmar Mungello and Donald Dominic Mungello, and grew up working as a projectionist at his family's drive-in movie theater. He earned a B.A. in Philosophy from George Washington University in 1965 and married Christine McKegg that same year in Washington, D.C. The couple then moved to California, where he completed an M.A. in Asian Studies in 1969 and a Ph.D. in History in 1973 at the University of California, Berkeley, according to the Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey Funeral Home obituary.

His doctoral dissertation, on the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's engagement with Confucian thought, became his first book, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord, published in 1977. Ten more books followed over the next four and a half decades, among them Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology in 1989, The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning in 1994, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500 to 1800 in 1999, Drowning Girls in China: Female Infanticide since 1650 in 2008, and, in 2016, a departure into his own family's history titled Remember This: A Family in America. His scholarship also earned him an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship in West Germany and a guest scholarship at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbuttel, the same library where Leibniz himself once served as librarian.

Before Baylor, Mungello taught at Lingnan College in Hong Kong, Briarcliff College in New York, and Coe College in Iowa. He joined Baylor University's History Department in 1994 and taught there until retiring in 2017, when the university named him Professor Emeritus of History; the Baylor University College of Arts and Sciences still lists him among its emeritus faculty. Through all of those moves, he kept editing the journal he had founded in 1979 on Chinese and Western historical scholarship, until he closed it in 2016.

Mungello was preceded in death by his wife, Christine McKegg Mungello, whom he married in 1965 and lost in 1997. He is survived by his daughter, Elise Anne Howard of Dallas; his son, Michael Campbell Mungello of Waco; four grandchildren; a great-granddaughter; and his siblings, Marianne Mungello Rohrer of St. Louis and Mark Mungello of Sicklerville, New Jersey.

He spent nearly five decades on a single question: what happened when two of the world's great intellectual traditions, Chinese and European, first tried to read each other. His eleven books remain standard references for historians of the Jesuit missions and the Chinese Rites Controversy, and for thirty-seven years he also edited a journal devoted to that same exchange of ideas. He was laid to rest at Oakwood Cemetery in Waco, Texas, beside Christine.