Shared Futures

University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

Jay M. Smith
Professor of History and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Curricula
jaysmith@email.unc.edu

Jay M. Smith is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Curricula at UNC-Chapel Hill.  He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Northern Illinois University (1983, 1985) and his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1990, the same year he joined the faculty at UNC.  A specialist of early-modern France, his major publications include The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France (1996); Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (2005); and The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, an edited volume forthcoming in 2006. 

His interest in internationalizing the curriculum at UNC has multiple points of origin.  As a teacher, he instructs students in the history of places and periods that lie beyond the boundaries of the familiar North American world.  As a scholar, his own research takes him to Europe on a regular basis and, like many other faculty in his own department of History, he craves new opportunities to take students abroad during summers or regular semesters, either to offer instruction within the parameters of a conventional academic course, or to experiment with a thematic seminar dependent on geographic place, or to supervise an intensive research experience.  Finally, as an administrator, he is in charge of implementing the new general education curriculum that goes into effect at UNC in the fall semester of 2006.  That curriculum, both in its content and its structure, reflects the internationalizing priorities of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Curricula will need to publicize the internationalizing dimensions of the curriculum while also seeking out new opportunities to advance the broad internationalizing mission embedded in the curriculum and in the Academic Plan adopted by the UNC faculty in 2003.  He already works closely with the Study Abroad office, he has been involved in the planning for a joint degree program with the National University of Singapore, and he is now preparing to hold workshops devoted to the new “global issues” requirement in the 2006 curriculum.