Christopher Smith

I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2017-20), pursuing a project on power and authority in archaic society, with a specific focus on models of kingship. 

From 2009 to 2017 I was Director of the British School at Rome, a leading research centre for humanities and fine arts.

I am also Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews, and my research has addressed the social and economic development of early Rome, Latium, and Etruria.  I have particular interests in archaeology and comparative developments in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, in general aspects of urbanization and in state formation.

I have written on the evolution and legal and symbolic significance of republican political institutions, particularly the gens,  and how these were characterised by contemporary sources  and interpreted in the modern historiography of the subject from Sigonio to Vico, Lewis Henry Morgan, Engels and Marx to the current day.

My interest in historiography, with a specific interest in fragmentary Roman historians, extends to Greek historiography and to writers such as Plutarch, Pliny the Elder and Aulus Gellius, who are our sources for much fragmentary literature, as well as the periods of the late Republic which generated the most substantial historical accounts. This in turn has led to work on Cicero.