Daniel L. Smail

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. 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 explores the legal, 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, slavery, and spatial imagination, the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999). His most recent book, Magdalena Coline: A Life Beyond Mediterranean Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the story of a formerly enslaved North African woman who engineered her own passage from slavery to freedom. With colleagues, he directs the online collection “The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe.” Smail's work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His books, in addition to those listed above, include Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016); The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Cornell University Press, 2003); On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press, 2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In March 2023, he was awarded a Doctor of Arts honoris causa by the Universeit Antwerpen. In April of 2024, he delivered the 2024 Lawrence Stone Lectures at the Davis Center, Department of History, Princeton University.