D. Vance Smith is a medievalist who grew up in Africa, learning isiNdebele along with English as a member of the Khumalo clan of the amaNdebele. Attending an all-African high school in Kenya, he also spoke Kiswahili and early Sheng (the Kenyan street vernacular). Before graduate school, he wrote two ethnographies on groups of people in South Sudan. What he thought of as biographical contradictions—becoming a medievalist of Western Europe despite little direct exposure to Europe except as a postcolonial subject in a Kenyan government school—have become the subject of a full-scale project on Africa and European history: The African Foundations of Europe (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

D. Vance Smith has been a Fulbright Scholar (at Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s College, London), an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center, a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an Old Dominion Professor.

He primarily at the nexus of anthropology and philosophy in both medieval and African literature, and teaches and works extensively in philosophy and critical theory. His 2020 book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press) is the third book in a series examining the medieval limit experience. The first, The Book of the Incipit, concerns beginnings in medieval and modern philosophy and literature, with Piers Plowman as the central exhibit. The second book, Arts of Possession, examines the concept of dwelling in medieval romance and economic theory and practice.

He has written articles on epic in Kenya; trees in Africanfuturism and medieval logic; Chaucer and Africa; Piers Plowman; grammatical theory; nationalism in medieval literature; logical fallacies and close reading; tragedy and Middle English literature; textual editing and manuscript transmission; book history; the masculine body in Middle English writing; women’s account books; medieval institutions and literature; medieval literary and philosophical form. He has edited a special issue of New Literary History on medieval cultural studies (with Michael Uebel), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (with Andrew Cole), Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (with Holly Crocker), and has written a number of prefaces and afterwords for essay collections and journals.

Current projects include Love Without Object, a study of love objects in mysticism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, and Blood Flowers, a study of the medieval roots of the African conservation and flower-farm industries.