Professor Dan Smail (Department of History, Harvard University) took up residence as a Neubauer Visiting Fellow in the Fall Quarter of 2015. Smail, who is a medievalist by training, has played a central role in pioneering a new scholarly approach known as Deep History, which operates at the intersection of history, anthropology, archeology, and evolutionary biology. This research program integrates the evolutionary history of the brain and the distant past of the human species into historical scholarship; it also seeks to embrace an array of sources and methodologies that are not conventionally used by historians. Deep History is part of a larger intellectual turn towards problems of environment, evolution, and climate, and it poses significant challenges to the discipline of history, as well as to other humanistic and social scientific modes of inquiry. At the Neubauer, Smail worked on a book on the deep history of humans and things, and the ecological or environmental consequences of those relationships. Moving beyond simple claims about the connection of modernity to material acquisitiveness, Smail sought to develop a wider perspective on the interactions of human beings with objects and, in particular, on the ways that objects are used, re-used and discarded.
Associate Professor of British History, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College
University of Chicago
His current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. The British Industrial Revolution saw the birth of the first fossil fuel economy. At the same time, geologists transformed the public understanding of the earth's...
Associate Professor of African History, African Studies, and the College; Affiliated Faculty, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
University of Chicago
Osborn is a historian of Africa, with a particular interest in precolonial and colonial West Africa. She is currently the Faculty Director of the Senegal study abroad program, and she has also served as co-director of the Committee on African Studies, chair of the College’s British fellowships...
Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor, Department of History
Harvard University
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 has explored the legal, social, and cultural...
