Biography

Blake Smith holds a PhD in European History from Northwestern University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2017).His dissertation explores late eighteenth-century French economic interactions with South Asia, and French views of the South Asian economy as a zone of stasis.His research on European Orientalism has been published in journals such as the History of European Ideas, French Cultural History, and the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient.At the EUI, Blake will investigate the eighteenth-century French Indologist Anquetil-Duperron, whose pioneering studies of Zoroastrian texts and the Upanishads relied on the archives of Catholic missionaries and the translations of Persian-speaking South Asians.He has served as a teaching assistant at Northwestern University for a number of early modern history courses focusing on Old Regime France, Mughal South Asia, Tudor and Stewart Britain, and Habsburg Spain.