D. Vance Smith

D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University, specializing in Medieval Literature within the Literature faculty. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His research interests encompass British literature, literary theory, medieval literature, poetry, poetics, and aesthetics, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Smith bridges medieval studies with African and decolonial literature and theory, Africanfuturism, the history of anthropology, and the medieval roots of colonial structures, governance, and thought. He works at the nexus of anthropology and philosophy in medieval literature, examining limit experiences such as the literature of dying, philosophical beginnings in medieval and modern literature with Piers Plowman as a central text, dwelling in medieval romance alongside economic theory and practice, and possession, exchange, and aristocratic signification in the Middle Ages.

Smith has held distinguished appointments and fellowships, including Fulbright Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and King’s College, London; NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center; Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study; and Guggenheim Fellow. He formerly served as Director of Medieval Studies at Princeton and is associated faculty in Comparative Literature, Humanistic Studies, Medieval Studies, and the Humanities Council. He chairs the board of ArtWorks, Trenton’s umbrella arts organization, and is vice-president of Passage Theatre’s board. His major publications include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2025), The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). He is the author of two ethnographies on South Sudan and has co-edited The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (with Andrew Cole) and a special issue of New Literary History on medieval cultural studies (with Michael Uebel). His articles cover Piers Plowman on grammatical theory, nationalism, negation, and the figure of Study; Chaucer on tragedy; Middle English literature; textual editing and manuscript transmission; book history; the masculine body in Middle English writing; women’s account books; medieval institutions and literature; and medieval literary and philosophical form.

Professional Email: dvsmith@princeton.edu