Professor S. A. (Steve) Smith

I am a social and cultural historian of modern Russia and China. I graduated in history from Oriel College, Oxford, then moved to Birmingham University to do a PhD in Russian history. I spent a year at Moscow University; and two separate years at Peking University and Fudan University in Shanghai. I taught for many years at the University of Essex before moving in 2008 to the EUI, Florence, where I was professor of comparative history. In 2012, I was elected a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and became a professor in the History Faculty. My early work was on the Russian Revolution and labour history; later, on workers, popular nationalism and the early Chinese Communist Party. In 2017, I published a prize-winning history of the Russian Revolution, and in 2026 two complementary books on Maoist China: one on the policies of the CCP towards religion and folk religion; the other on the survival of folk religion in twentieth-century China. My interests are broad, encouraged by teaching and doctoral supervision at Essex and the EUI and by twenty-five years on the board of the journal Past and Present.