Teaches American social and cultural history, with emphasis on the American South and sensory history.

A Carolina Distinguished Professor, Mark Smith teaches the introductory undergraduate survey to US history (to 1865), undergraduate courses on the Old South, and graduate courses on the U.S. nineteenth-century.

He is author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (winner of the Organization of American Historians’ 1997 Avery O. Craven Award and South Carolina Historical Society’s Book of the Year); Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South, published by Cambridge University Press in 1998; Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (University of North Carolina Press, 2006; a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title), Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (University of California Press, 2008), Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane (University of Georgia Press, 2011), and Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which he co-authored with Susan Cutter, Christopher T. Emrich, Jerry T. Mitchell, Walter W. Piegorsch, and Lynn Weber. His edited books include The Old South (Blackwell, 2000), Hearing History: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), Writing the American Past (Wiley, 2008), and, with Robert Paquette, The Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2010).