Faculty

Richard Smith

I joined CVSP full time in 1993 and from 1998 have been one-third in the SBHS department, teaching one course a semester in social anthropology (SOAN). 

I obtained my doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1989 after doing a B.A. in Maths and Social Anthropology at Cambridge and an M.Litt. at the University of Delhi.  My Ph.D. thesis, published in 1996 as Rule by Records: Land registration and village custom in early British Panjab, critiqued the colonial construction of knowledge about Indian society by analysing a central institution of British rule in India, the registration of land.  I subsequently joined Martha Mundy in research on land registration under Ottoman rule and the British Mandate in villages of northern Jordan, which resulted in a joint monograph published in 2007, Governing property, making the modern state: Law, administration and production in Ottoman Syria.

The courses I usually teach are CVSP 201 to 204 and SOAN 103, 212, 214, 222 or 310.