Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt collection from Lucca and Marseille. Among other subjects, he has written on the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (2016);with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011); On Deep History and the Brain (2008); and The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003).
Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History