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Laura Ackerman Smoller, Ph.D.
Laura Ackerman Smoller, a Little Rock native, graduated from Hall High School and holds an A.B. in History with Music summa cum laude from Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1991 and subsequently taught 6 years at Stanford University before returning home to Little Rock to join the UALR and UAMS faculties in 1997. At UALR, where she is Professor of History, Smoller teaches upper-level courses on medieval Europe, the history of disease, the history of apocalyptic thought, and the history of magic, science, and the occult. She is adjunct associate professor in the Division of Medical Humanities at UAMS, where she teaches a senior longitudinal course on Disease and Society from Antiquity to the Present.
She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer and the Religious Life of the Later Middle Ages, work that has been supported by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and by a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A future book project, Astrology and the Sibyls: Routes to Religious Truth in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, arises from work she did in 2003-06 in conjunction with the research group “Knowledge and Belief” sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
She is married to Bruce Smoller, former chair of the pathology department at UAMS and now Executive Vice President of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, and they have two grown sons, Jason and Gabriel. For fun, she enjoys reading, doing Pilates, playing the flute, and walking her dogs.
Education:
A.B., History with Music, summa cum laude, Dartmouth College, 1981 A.M., History, Harvard University, 1984 Ph.D., History, Harvard University, 1991
Research Interests:
Medieval Europe Astrology Apocalyptic thought Saints and miracles Prophecy Medicine and disease
Select Publications:
Book: History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d'Ailly, 1350-1420. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Refereed articles: “From Authentic Miracles to a Rhetoric of Authenticity: Examples from the Canonization and Cult of St. Vincent Ferrer.” Church History 80, no. 4 (2011): 773-97. “Teste Albumasare cum Sibylla: Astrology and the Sibyls in Medieval Europe.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010): 76-89. “Astrology and the Sibyls: John of Legnano’s De adventu Christi and the Natural Theology of the Later Middle Ages.” Science in Context 20:3 (2007): 423-50. &nbso; "A Case of Demonic Possession in Fifteenth-Century Brittany: Perrin Hervé and the Nascent Cult of Vincent Ferrer.” In Michael Goodich, ed. Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials. NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006. Pp. 149-76. “Holy Mothers: The History of a Designation of Spiritual Status.” In Marc Forster and Ben Kaplan, eds. Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. 178-200. “Northern and Southern Sanctity in the Canonization of Vincent Ferrer: The Effects of Procedural Differences on the Image of the Saint.” In Gábor Klaniczay, ed. Procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge: aspects juridiques et religieux. Collection de l’École française de Rome 340. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2004. Pp. 289-308. “Of Earthquakes, Hail, Frogs, and Geography: Plague and the Investigation of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages.” In Paul Freedman and Caroline Bynum, eds. Last Things: Eschatology and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Pp. 156-187. “The Alfonsine Tables and the End of the World: Astrology and Apocalyptic Calculation in the Later Middle Ages.” In Alberto Ferreiro, ed., The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Burton Russell. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998. Pp. 211-39. “Miracle, Memory, and Meaning in the Canonization of Vincent Ferrer, 1453-54.” Speculum 73(1998): 429-54. “Defining the Boundaries of the Natural in the Fifteenth Century: The Inquest into the Miracles of St. Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419).” Viator 28 (1997): 333-59.
For more information please contact: Email:
humanities@uams.edu |
