Fellowship / Fellows

Daniel Lord Smail

  • 2011–2012
  • History
  • Joy Foundation Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Daniel Lord Smail
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Daniel Lord Smail, a professor at Harvard University, is a student of early human history; in his research and teaching, he covers a span of time from humanity’s deep past to the later Middle Ages. At Radcliffe Exploratory Seminars in 2008 and 2009, he joined colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, and biology to develop new frames or narratives for binding human history together into a seamless whole. One of these frames is material culture, the subject of his fellowship project.

During his fellowship, Smail will approach transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe through the astonishingly rich archival records generated by the process of debt recovery. Working in Lucca and Marseille, he has been exploring some of the tens of thousands of inventories listing objects seized by sergeants of the court from the households of debtors, whether peasants or well-to-do merchants. Using these and other sources, he seeks to understand how the “thickening” of goods in households—a characteristic feature of 14th-century Europe—changed the meaning or signification of objects and influenced the dramatic expansion of consumer credit.

Smail received his PhD from the University of Michigan and has published several prize-winning books on medieval European history. His work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he began this project as a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2007, the students of Harvard University awarded him a Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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