Thomas Smith
Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D. in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006
Dr. Thomas Smith completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 and joins the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the fall of 2008. His dissertation, “Reform and Empire: The British and American Transnational Search for Rights of Black People in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” looks to understand the connections between the strategies of metropolitan reformers and the development of a transnational discourse of rights. This work investigates the struggle to realize the universalist implications of reformist appeals amidst the context of U.S. and British imperialism. Dr. Smith has published an article in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History on one aspect of this research and is working on several projects that address the possibilities and bounds that transnational reformers created and encountered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Smith is interested in Atlantic history, 19th and 20th century U.S. Studies, Latin American history and the history of human rights.