Susan J. Smith

Professor Susan Smith became President of the British Academy in 2025. Smith, an Emerita Honorary Professor of Social and Economic Geography at the University of Cambridge, brought a collaborative interdisciplinary approach to social geography that produced significant research on the links between housing, inequality, health, and wellbeing.

In addition to a programme of research spanning more than 30 years, Professor Smith is experienced in research management, research strategy, and research assessment of all kinds. She has contributed to the work of the ESRC (Research Grants Board, Professorial Fellowships Commissioning Panel, Public Services Programme Commissioning Panel), HEFCE (as a panel member in the 2001 and 2008 Research Assessment Exercises), the Leverhulme Trust (Philip Leverhulme Prize panel), and to research development and monitoring in HEIs within and beyond the UK. She has a wide-ranging teaching and examining portfolio, at all levels, in a variety of topics; and she is active in the communication dissemination of ideas beyond the academy.

Her empirical work in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. has been funded by research councils, public bodies, and charitable trusts.

Smith is a member of the Society of Authors, and of the Royal Geographical Society, which awarded her the Victoria Medal in 2014; she is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She has enjoyed a variety of visiting positions internationally at the European University Institute; the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre; University of California, Los Angeles; and the Australian National University, RMIT, and Curtin Universities in Australia.

She earned her B.A. and M.A. in Geography at St Anne’s College, Oxford University and her D.Phil. from the Faculty of Anthropology and Geography at Nuffield College, Oxford University.