Professor Lesley Smith

Director of the Farmington Institute

Professor Lesley Smith is Director of the Farmington Institute at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, Professor of Medieval Intellectual History at Oxford University and Fellow Emerita in Politics and Senior Tutor at Harris Manchester College. 

Lesley is from Sunderland and is a proud north-easterner.  She has degrees from the London School of Economics [BSc (Econ), MSc (History of Political Thought)] and a doctorate in the medieval exegesis of the Ten Commandments, from Oxford University.  She was a Commonwealth Scholar at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, and a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Oxford.

Lesley’s research centres on the medieval Bible, as a text, as the basis for commentary, and as a physical object.  She is interested in the ways in which the Bible was used by and disseminated to scholars, to clergy and to the laity, which includes the study of Jewish-Christian and Muslim-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. 

Her most recent books are Fragments of a World:  William of Auvergne and his Medieval Life (University of Chicago Press) and Handwritten:  Remarkable People on the Page (Bodleian Library Publications).