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 and the Historians' Craft, 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), How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (University of North Carolina Press, 2006, a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title), and Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (University of California Press, 2008). His edited books include The Old South (Blackwell, 2000), Hearing History: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), and Writing the American Past (Wiley, 2008), and, with Robert Paquette, The Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford, 2010). He has published articles 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 American History, and the Journal of The Historical Society. He serves or has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Social History, The Southern Quarterly, The Senses and Society, and the Journal of American History. Professor Smith has lectured in Europe, throughout the United States, Australia, and China and his work has been reviewed and featured in the New York Times, the London Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Brain, and Science. He has presented his work to the National Academy of Science, served as the William Hewit Distinguished Professor at the University of Northern Colorado, as the 2009 Lamar Lecturer, as a Guest Editor for a forum on the history of the senses for the Journal of American History, and as the General Editor of the four-volume Slavery in North America: from the Colonial Period to Emancipation (Pickering & Chatto, 2008). Professor Smith is also the General Editor of the Southern Classics Series (University of South Carolina Press), co-editor of Liverpool University's Studies in International Slavery, co-editor of Cambridge University Press’ series, Studies on the American South, and General Editor of the University of Illinois Press’ Studies in Sensory History. Professor Smith is the current President of The Historical Society.
Current Activities
In addition to directing several PhD dissertations, I'm 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 and causation. I’m also co-PI of a large National Science Foundation, three-year grant dedicated to exploring differential recovery rates from Hurricane Katrina.
I am at work on two books, a history of Hurricane Camille (to be published by the University of Georgia Press) and a larger project, under contract with the trade division of Oxford University Press, on a sensory history of the American Civil War, tentatively entitled When War Makes Sense: A Sensory History of America’s Greatest Conflict.
Professor Smith's c.v. is located here.
He works with the Markson Thoma Literary Agency.
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