| Julia M. H. Smith | |
| Birth Name: | Julia Mary Howard Smith |
| Birth Date: | 29 May 1956 df=y |
| Education: | South Hampstead High School |
| Alma Mater: | Newnham College, Cambridge Corpus Christi College, Oxford |
| Notable Works: | Europe after Rome: a New Cultural History 500–1000 |
| Workplaces: | University of Sheffield University of St Andrews University of Manchester Trinity College, Connecticut University of Glasgow University of Oxford |
| Birth Place: | Cambridge, England |
Julia Mary Howard Smith, (born 29 May 1956) is an American medievalist who is the Chichele Professor of Medieval History at All Souls College, Oxford.[1] She was formerly Edwards Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.[2]
Smith was born on 29 May 1956 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.[3] She was educated at South Hampstead High School, an all-girls Private school in London. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1975 to 1978, followed by postgraduate study at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1981.
Smith lectured at the University of Sheffield, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Manchester in the 1980s. In 1986, she was appointed an assistant professor at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. In 1995, she joined the University of St Andrews as Reader in Medieval History. In 2005, she was appointed Edwards Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.[4]
In 2016, Smith was appointed Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and elected a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She gave her inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor on 31 January 2019: it was tiled "Thinking with Things: Reframing Relics in the Early Middle Ages".[5]
She has held a range of international research fellowships. From 1999 to 2000 she was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study and in 2001 and 2013 she held a fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton.
In 2005, Smith married fellow historian Hamish Scott.
In 2010 she delivered the Raleigh Lecture on the subject of relics in the Medieval West.[6] In 2011 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[7] Smith delivered the Birbkbeck lecture series at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2018, on the subject "The Religious Life of Things in Early Christianity".[8]