B.A. St. John's College, Maryland, 1967. - M.A. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1972. - Ph.D. (joint in History and History of Science), 1976, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Professor Smith teaches a variety of courses in medieval history as well as the history of science from antiquity to the late Enlightenment. Broadly speaking, his interests lie in the field of intellectual history from the pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, his scholarly focus being on the evolution of pre-Newtonian theories of visual perception.