Daniel Lord Smail

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History, and interim chair of the Department of History in 2025-2026. His research and teaching address the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 as well as 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, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999). His book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt collection from Lucca and Marseille. With several colleagues, he is directs a digital humanities project, The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe.