Teaches American social and cultural history, with emphasis on the American South.

Professor Smith teaches the introductory undergraduate survey to US history (to 1865), undergraduate courses on the Old South, the Historians' Craft, and the Civil War and Reconstruction, and graduate courses on the Comparative History of Time and the U.S. nineteenth-century. He is author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (winner of the Organization of American Historians' 1997 Avery O. Craven Award and South Carolina Historical Society's Book of the Year); Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South, published by Cambridge University Press in 1998; Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and, most recently, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). His edited books include The Old South (Blackwell, 2000), Hearing History: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2004), and Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (University of South Carolina Press, 2006). He has published numerous articles, including pieces in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Social History, The Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education), the Journal of The Historical Society, and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. This year, he will publish Sensory History (Berg, 2007). He has presented dozens of papers in the United States, has lectured in Europe, Australia, and China, and his work has been featured on television and in The New York Times. Professor Smith has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of the Historical Society and he is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of American History, the Journal of Social History, the Southern Quarterly Review, and The Senses and Society. He is joint General Editor, with Jack Sproat, of the Southern Classics Series, published by the University of South Carolina Press, and he is Co-Editor (with Dmitri van den Bersselaar and Charles Forsdick of the University of Liverpool) of the series Liverpool Studies in International Slavery (in association with Centre for the Study of International Slavery and published by the University of Liverpool Press). Most recently, Professor Smith, as a member of an interdisciplinary team of five scholars, won a three-year, $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study "The Recovery Divide: Sociospatial Disparities in Disaster Recovery from Hurricane Katrina along Mississippi's Gulf Coast."

Current Activities

I'm currently directing several Ph.D. dissertations on various aspects of US history and working on the history of hurricanes and differential recovery rates in southern Mississippi as part of a multi-year NSF grant. I'm also knee-deep in the "field" of sensory history--a vibrant area of historical inquiry dedicated to examining the roles played by olfaction, hearing, touch, and taste (as well as vision) in shaping the past. My concern is to help restore the full sensory texture of history and examine what the senses in addition to seeing might be able to tell us about historical experience. I continue to work on various aspects of the history of slavery, particularly in its international context.