Ingrid A. R. De Smet, FBA, is an academic, specialising in the intellectual culture of early modern France and the Low Countries. She is Professor of French and Neo-Latin studies at the University of Warwick.
De Smet completed a postgraduate diploma at the Université Catholique de Louvain, and then carried out doctoral studies at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating PhD in 1993 with a thesis on Neo-Latin Menippean satire in the Low Countries and France. After that she spent three years as a prize fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and commenced a two-year British Academy postdoctoral fellowship in 1995. She then joined the University of Warwick as a lecturer in 1997, where she was later appointed Professor of French and Neo-Latin Studies; in 2007, she was appointed Director of the Centre for Study of the Renaissance, although she stepped between 2011 and 2014 when she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow; when that expired in 2014, she returned to her directorship.[1] [2]
According to her British Academy profile, De Smet's research focuses on "Renaissance and Early Modern intellectual culture, especially in France and the Low Countries; sixteenth and early-seventeenth century French literature; Neo-Latin Studies; the Republic of Letters; [and] the Classical tradition".[3]
In 2014, De Smet was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[3] She has also received a doctor of letters degree from the University of Warwick.[1]