Steve Smith

Steve (S. A.) Smith is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Professor in the History Faculty of Oxford University. He was formerly Professor of Comparative History at the European University Institute, Florence, and Professor of History at the University of Essex. He is a historian of modern Russia and China, who works on the interface of social and political history and, more recently, of comparative Communism. He has published books on Russian history –  including the prize-winning Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis (Oxford, 2017) – and two books on Chinese history, plus Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2008). He edited the Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford, 2014) and was a co-editor of the Cambridge History of Communism (Cambridge, 2017). He is currently working on a comparative study of the efforts of the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s and the Chinese state in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate popular religion. He is a former editor of Past and Present and a Vice-President of the Past and Present Society. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.