S. A. Smith is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He was a graduate student at Moscow State University and Peking University in the late 1970s and early 1980s and taught for many years at the University of Essex. More recently, he was professor of comparative history at the European University Institute, Florence. He has written extensively on the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and is currently writing a book which compares the efforts of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes to eliminate 'superstition' from daily life, in areas such as popular religion, calendrical and life-cycle rituals, agriculture, and folk medicine, and which explores how sections of the populace engaged the regimes through 'politics of the supernatural'.
