Daniel Lord Smail

Daniel Lord Smail serves as the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he has established himself as a leading authority on Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and deep human history. His innovative research combines traditional medieval history with anthropological approaches, focusing on legal culture, material life, and social dynamics in medieval Mediterranean cities, particularly Marseille. His scholarly contributions include numerous acclaimed books such as "Imaginary Cartographies" (1999), "The Consumption of Justice" (2003), "On Deep History and the Brain" (2008), and "Legal Plunder" (2016). His work spans diverse subjects from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, while pioneering the field of neurohistory. His current research examines the story of a formerly enslaved North African woman in fifteenth-century Marseille who achieved self-manumission. Smail's excellence in both research and teaching has been recognized with prestigious awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize (2007), the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award (2014), and an honorary doctorate from the Universeit Antwerpen (2023)