History

Senior Lecturer

Office: 409, 25 Gordon Square
Office hour: Monday 4-5 during term time, or email me to make an appointment.
External phone: 020 7679 3613
Internal phone: 33613

Personal website
E-mail: a.i.p.smith@ucl.ac.uk

I joined the department in 2002. Before coming to UCL, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard and a lecturer in American history at Queen Mary, University of London. I have a BA in Modern History from Oxford, an MA from Sheffield and my PhD is from Cambridge. In 2009, I was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I am currently serving as the Honorary Secretary of the Royal Historical Society.

My main historical interest is in the nature of politics and political change, with a concentration on the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. My book, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (Oxford University Press, 2006) explores the impact of the Civil War on partisanship and political mobilisation, while The American Civil War (Palgrave, 2007) is an overview of the war which emphasises the importance of home front public opinion in determining the outcome. I have recently contributed to the department's AHRC-funded Images of America project and to a book on the global image of Abraham Lincoln. My current projects are a book about politics in the United States between 1848 and 1876 and a short biography of Abraham Lincoln. My book reviews and essays have appeared regularly in the Times Literary Supplement and other journals.

I have contributed to various programmes on BBC Radio and have presented a series of documentaries about the American Civil War on Radio 3.  I often give talks in schools and to Historical Association branches and the like.

I contribute to teaching on two broad US history survey courses: Building the American Nation and the Making of Modern America. My final year special subject is Abraham Lincoln and the Crisis of the Union and I have contributed two MA options, on Abraham Lincoln and on American historical writing.

Areas of Research Supervision:

I have supervised a completed PhD on political mobilisation in the 1820s and was the second supervisor for students working on Anglo-American relations, American philanthropic organisations in the inter-war period and aspects of US foreign policy in the Cold War. I am currently first or second supervisor for students working on music in nineteenth-century American politics, on the Continental Army and the development of American national identity, and on the folk revival in Britain and the US in the postwar period. If you are interested in pursuing doctoral research in any period of American political history or in any aspect of the Civil War or antebellum era, please get in touch with me.

Recent Publications include:

-'The Politics of Theatrical Reform in Victorian America' in American Nineteenth Century History 13:3 (2012): 231-346

“The ‘Cult’ of Abraham Lincoln and the Strange Survival of Liberal England in the Era of the World Wars,” Twentieth Century British History 21: 4 (2010) 486-509.

-The Challenge of Biography: What do they know of Lincoln, who only Lincoln know?', Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 31:2 (Summer 2010): 61-75

- The American Civil War (New York: Palgrave, 2007)

- No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

- 'American Political Culture,' in Howard Temperly and Chris Bigsby, eds., A New Introduction to American Studies (Pearson Education, 2005)

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