Gillian Smith

Gillian Smith is a social historian of early modern England. Her interests include welfare, social control, disaster response, and the treatment of women in the early English criminal justice system, and she will cheerfully admit her enthusiasm for microhistory. 

In her dissertation, Gillian seeks to revolutionize the intertwined historiographies of poor relief, state-building, and social control through the first exhaustive study of England’s oldest secular public welfare system. Her examination of the five “royal hospitals” established in London in the mid-sixteenth century has been awarded several  grants. In 2027, Gillian will be a resident partner at the London Archives as she continues this research.

Gillian received her B.A. at UCLA, where, as a Keck fellow, she wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on English petty traitors which won the Mary Ritter Beard Award. She is now adapting that project for publication and has presented it at NACBS under the working title “Victimhood, Villainy, and Vitriol: Husband-Killers in Early Modern England.” Prior to entering the Ph.D. program at Stanford, she also worked on projects relating to modern Jewish history, most notably studying the Mechelen transit camp as a Alan D. Leve Center Undergraduate Fellow. The culmination of her work as a researcher and editor was the posthumous publication of Israel Cappell’s memoir With Many Miracles: A Memoir of Holocaust Survival in Belgium (2024).