Ses domaines de spécialisation couvrent la culture matérielle, la justice et le règlement des conflits, le crédit et l’histoire sociale des villes, considérés dans une perspective anthropologique et dans le cadre des villes méditerranéennes des XIIIe-XVe siècles. Il a particulièrement travaillé dans les archives notariales de Marseille et dans les archives judiciaires de Lucques, dont il a tiré deux livres :
Imaginary Cartographies : Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999.
The Consumption of Justice : Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003.
Il a dirigé deux ouvrages généraux sur des sujets voisins :
Fama : The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. (dir. avec T. Fenster), Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003.
Vengeance in Medieval Europe. A Reader (dir. avec K. L. Gibson), Toronto, 2009.
D. Smail achève actuellement un livre qui s’appellera Goods and debts in Medieval Mediterranean Europe, et dans lequel il étudiera l’endettement et le recouvrement des créances dans les archives judiciaires et les inventaires après décès de Lucques et Marseille entre 1330 et 1450. Ses séminaires parisiens présenteront des éléments de ce nouveau livre.
Un autre champ d’intérêt actuel de D. Smail est la neurohistory ou deep history (history of the brain), qui entend plonger loin dans le passé au-delà des traditionnelles limites de l’histoire, pour embrasser « millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more. Combining cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory with the latest discoveries about human genes, brains, and material culture, [la] Deep History invites scholars to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history » (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/02/26/a_not_so_brief_history_of_time).
Cette discipline peu pratiquée en France mérite qu’on laisse la parole à Smail lui-même (http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/smail.php) pour expliquer ce qu’elle est : « I am a student of early human history, I cover a span of time from humanity’s deep history in Africa to Mediterranean Europe in the later middle ages. The overarching intellectual project of my work in recent years has been to identify and develop new frames or narratives for binding human history together into a seamless whole. I work under the assumption that history is not a political science designed to explain the present. It is an anthropological science designed to help us understand humanity. In everything I do, I hope to show how the intellectual projects that drive transnational and global histories work equally well across time, and to offer the deep past as the new intellectual frontier of historical research and historical framing in the twenty-first century ».
« Within the broad field of deep human history or early global history, my specialized research has centered on the study of brain and behavior. My 2008 book,On Deep History and the Brain, proposes the idea of a “neurohistory”, a history, as I define it, that explores how cultural structures shape patterns of the brain-body system and alter forms of endocrine regulation. This viewpoint allows us to add a new interpretative dimension to our understanding of cultural transformations ; it offers a way to incorporate the neurosciences into history without having recourse to historically sterile versions of evolutionary psychology (notably approaches that rely on strong theories of massive modularity and evolved dispositions). I am also interested in exploring human history using intellectual tools borrowed from complexity theory and systems approaches. In tandem with my current project on material culture, I have made a special study of goods, ornaments, and clothing in deep human history ».
D. Smail a publié dans ce domaine : On Deep History and the Brain, Berkeley, 2008, et (dir. avec A. Shryock), Deep History : The Architecture of Past and Present, Berkeley, 2011.
