Tim Smith is a historian of Modern France who teaches at the undergraduate level in various fields including Modern Europe, the United States since 1945, the comparative public policy of rich nations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the history of globalization. At the graduate level, Smith has supervised in several fields and countries. At the M.A. level this includes France, Germany, the UK, Canada and the USA. Smith is cross-listed in the Department of Political Studies and can supervise Politics students. He also teaches in the School of Policy Studies. Smith has received the History Department's Teaching Award twice and has been nominated for the Frank Knox Teaching Award five times. He is working on a general history of the welfare state in rich nations since 1945.
In the five years after the publication of France in Crisis / La France injuste Smith gave over 200 television, radio and print media interviews in France, the UK and North America to discuss the crisis of the French economy and social model. He has given a keynote address at a conference on youth unemployment at the French National Assembly, has had his work mentioned in debates in the French Parliament as well as election campaign brochures of French political parties. Smith has written several invited newspaper articles and op-eds in Le Figaro, the Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal, etc. on the crisis of the French social model.
France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization since 1980
Creating the Welfare State in France, 1880-1940
Articles in peer-reviewed journals
- "The Plight of the Able-Bodied Poor and the Unemployed in Urban France, 1880-1914." European History Quarterly vol. 30, no. 2 (April 2000): 147-184.
- "Assistance and Repression: Rural Exodus, Vagabondage and Social Crisis in France, 1880 1914," Journal of Social History vol. 32, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 821-46
- "The Social Transformation of Hospitals and the Rise of Medical Insurance in France, 1914-1943," The Historical Journal vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec. 1998): 1055-1087
- "Republicans, Catholics and Social Reform: Lyon, 1870-1920," French History vol. 12, no. 3(September 1998): 246-275
- "The Ideology of Charity, the Image of the English Poor Law, and Debates over the Right to Assistance in France, 1830-1905," The Historical Journal vol. 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 997-1032.
- "Public Assistance and Labor Supply in Nineteenth-Century Lyon," Journal of Modern History vol. 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 1-30
- "In Defense of Privilege: The City of London and the Challenge of Municipal Reform, 1875-1890," Journal of Social History vol. 27, no. 1 (Fall, 1993): 59-83.
Articles commissioned by editors
- "The Nineteenth Century," in Peter Stearns, ed. Encyclopedia of European Social History (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons / Macmillan Library, 2000): I, 205-218.
- "Marginal Peoples," Encyclopedia of European Social History, III, 175-186.
- "Charity and Poor Relief: The Modern Period," Encyclopedia of European Social History, III, 453-465.
- "The History of European and North American Social Policy," Radical History Review vol. 69 (Fall 1997): 182-198
- "Il 'modello sociale francese' nell'era della globalizzazione," Ventunesimo secolo V, 11 (Oct. 2006)
- "Stuck on the Streets: French Labor," Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 8, 1 (Winter/Spring 2007), pp. 18-23
- "The Welfare State," Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)
- "France in Crisis? Economic and Welfare Policy Reform," in Developments in French Politics 5th edition, Alistair Cole, Sophie Meunier and Vincent Tiberj, eds. (New York: Palgrave / Macmillan, 2013).
- "Renegotiating the Social Contract: Western Europe, Great Britain and North America," in The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol III, eds. Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 552-574.
- "France," in Herbert Obinger, Peter Starke and Klaus Petersen eds., War and the Welfare State in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2017)
