Timothy B. Smith is associate professor of history and chair of undergraduate studies at Queen’s University, Ontario where he teaches modern European history, social history, comparative public policy, and the histories of the welfare state and globalization.
Smith is author of France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980 and Creating the Welfare State in France, 1880-1940, as well as numerous articles. He is currently working on two book projects. The first is a general history of France since 1980. The second project is tentatively called All the Welfare in the World: Public Policy in Rich Nations in the Age of Globalization in which Smith hopes to examine how politicians, state officials, labor unions, employers’ associations, and voters in three nations (France, Sweden and Canada) have responded since the mid-1970s to the challenges posed by globalization (rising trade, falling tariffs, floating currencies, capital flight), economic crises, and the “maturing” of the welfare state. Through detailed examinations of national debates and reform processes, he hopes to show how challenges common to the rich industrialized world were and are mediated in different ways through national politics, pre-existing policy paths, institutional structures, leaders’ historical understanding of past policy paths, values and national culture.