Stephen Smith (historian)
Stephen Anthony Smith, FBA, FRHistS is a British historian and academic. Since 2012, he has been Professor of History at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.Education
Born in 1952, Smith completed his undergraduate studies at Oriel College, Oxford, graduating with a modern history degree. In 1974, he was then awarded a Master of Social Science degree in Soviet studies from the University of Birmingham, where he remained to carry out doctoral studies; his PhD was awarded in 1980 for his thesis "The Russian Revolution and the factories of Petrograd, February 1917 to June 1918".Career
While completing his PhD, Smith taught at the Moscow State University from 1976 to 1977, and then joined the faculty of the University of Essex as a lecturer in 1977. He was promoted to a senior lectureship in 1984 and was then appointed Professor of History in 1991. In 2008, he moved to the European University Institute in Florence to be Professor of Comparative History, and remained there until 2012, when he was appointed Professor of History at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was also editor of the journal Past & Present from 2009 to 2014.
Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1995, and a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy, in 2014.Research and bibliography
According to his college profile, Smith's "research interests are in the histories of modern Russia and China and in comparative Communism."
