Daniel Lord Smail

Professor of History at Harvard University

Areas of expertise

- Material culture
- History and anthropology of law and justice, 1200-1600
- Urban history, southern France, Italy, Mediterranean
- Natural history and neurohistory

Major works

Vengeance in Medieval Europe: A Reader. Coedited with Kelly Lyn Gibson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009; On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008; The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003; Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. Coedited with Thelma Fenster. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003; Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

About me

Daniel Lord Smail is professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the social and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. Smail's work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past