Dr Tim Smith
I am a Roman historian specialising in the social and political history of the republic and early empire. I am from Aotearoa–New Zealand. I have a Master of Arts in Classics and another in Literary Translation Studies, both from Victoria University of Wellington. I moved to Oxford to write my DPhil thesis in 2018. I have been a lecturer in Roman history at Oxford since 2021.
My research focuses on three aspects of the ancient world: popular participation in politics in Rome; how popular processes were used and abused by authoritarian regimes; and the consequences of war and violence. I am working on two books: the first on the aedileship in Rome; the second on survivors of war in the Roman world. I also have a few side projects on literary translation: I have published on Dante and Seamus Heaney’s reception of Italian poetry, and I am working on translating an extensive collection of selected poems by the Italian poet Claudio Pasi.
I teach a wide range of papers on Roman history. I am the convenor for ‘Cicero: Politics and Thought’ and ‘Imperial Culture and Society, c. AD 50-150: Archaeology and History’. I teach all Roman history period papers (from the middle republic to early empire); similar Mods/Prelims papers (such as ‘Tacitus and Tiberius’, ‘Cicero and Catiline’, ‘Sallust, Jugurtha’, and the new paper on ‘People and Politics in the Roman Republic, 58–52 BCE’, for which I am co-convenor); and ‘Texts and Contexts’.
- Smith, T. (2025) ‘Reluctant Candidates and Spontaneous Elections in Republican Rome’, Classical Antiquity 44.2, 315–51.
- Smith, T. (2024) ‘Sulla and Electoral Authoritarianism’, Phoenix 78.3–4, 87–114.
- Smith, T. (2024) ‘Authoritarian elections in imperial Rome’, Omnibus 88, 1–3.
- Smith, T. (2024) ‘Where’s Vestorius? Locating Rome’s Aediles’, in A. López García (ed.) Running the Empire: The Places of Roman Governance (London), 99–119.
- Smith, T. (2023) ‘State Terrorism in the Late Roman Republic’, in G. Wrightson (ed.) Terrorism through the Ages (Leiden and Boston), 72–83.
- Smith, T. (2021) ‘Elections in the Time of Cinna’, Historia 70.1, 29–54.
