Currently Director of the Program in Medieval Studies, Smith teaches undergraduate courses on medieval literature and medieval history, occasional courses on African literature and (in the Freshman Seminars) on forgetting and the history of the book.  Recent graduate courses have included the BST Seminar in literary theory and, in medieval literature, “Property and Alterity,” “Registration and Romance,” and “Dying Medieval.”  In the Bread Loaf School of English he teaches graduate courses on Dante, Chaucer, and the Bible as Literature.  His research interests include intellectual history, scholasticism (especially medieval physics and logic), continental philosophy, William Langland, Chaucer.  He is completing a book entitled Dying Medieval: The Termination of Middle English Literature, and working on projects that include a book on medieval heraldic narrative, an edition of Piers Plowman, and commissioned articles on literary formalism and philosophical form, and medieval English institutions and literary history. He has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the U.K. Fulbright Commission, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.

Recent Publications: Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).  Recent articles: “Chaucer as an English Writer,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (forthcoming, Yale University Press); “Marx and T.F. Tout: Household, City, and History at Manchester.”  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

.  Fall, 2004; “Piers Plowman and the National Noetic  of Edward III.”  In Imagining the Medieval English Community.  Ed. Kathy Lavezzo.  University of Minnesota Press.  2003; “Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable.”   In New Medieval Literatures 5.  Ed. Rita Copeland.  Oxford University Press, 2001.