Timothy Smith
Mary Ewart Junior Research Fellow
Timothy Smith is a Roman historian specialising in the social and political history of the republic and early empire. He is from Aotearoa New Zealand. He holds a Master of Arts in Classics and another in Literary Translation Studies, both from Victoria University of Wellington. He completed his DPhil at Merton College, Oxford, in 2022.
He is currently working on two books. The first provides the first comprehensive study in English of the aedileship at Rome (Aediles and the Roman People: A Social History of a Magistracy, Cambridge University Press). The second explores the aftermath of conflict in the Roman world and experiences of survivors of war (Surviving War and Violence in the Roman World, Bloomsbury). He also has a few side projects on literary translation: he has published on Dante and Seamus Heaney’s reception of Italian poetry, and he is working on translating an extensive collection of selected poems by the Italian poet Claudio Pasi.
Research interests
- The consequences of war and violence in the ancient world
- Elections and popular participation in ancient Rome
- Rome’s political institutions
- Authoritarianism in ancient Rome
- Cicero’s political thought
Academic biography
2026−present Mary Ewart Junior Research Fellow in Classics, Somerville College, Oxford
2023−2026 Departmental Lecturer in Roman History, Faculty of Classics, Oxford
2021−2023 Lecturer in Classics, Regent’s Park College, Oxford
Publications
The Roman Censorship: Perceptions and Realities (2026). Berlin: De Gruyter (co-edited with Alex A. Antoniou and Kimberley Webb). Link.
‘Performing the Censorship in the Early Roman Empire’ (2026), in A. A. Antoniou, T. Smith, and K. Webb (eds.) The Roman Censorship: Perceptions and Realities (Berlin: De Gruyter). Link.
‘Reluctant Candidates and Spontaneous Elections in Republican Rome’ (2025), Classical Antiquity 44.2, 315–51. Link.
‘Election promises in Rome’ (2025), in E. Zampieri (ed.) In ambitione artifices: Electioneering and Elections in the Roman Republic (Sevilla: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla), 71–90.
‘Sulla and Electoral Authoritarianism’ (2024), Phoenix 78.3–4, 87–114. Link.
‘Where’s Vestorius? Locating Rome’s Aediles’ (2024), in A. López García (ed.) Running the Empire: The Places of Roman Governance (London: Routledge), 99–119. Link.
‘State Terrorism in the Late Roman Republic’ (2023), in G. Wrightson (ed.) Terrorism through the Ages (Leiden: Brill), 72–83. Link.
‘Elections in the Time of Cinna’ (2021, Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte 70.1, 29–54. Link.