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Max Smith is an Earl S. Johnson Lecturer in Political Science in MAPSS. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame and has a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.  

Dr. Smith’s research interests focus on the history of political thought and contemporary democratic theory. Specifically, he is interested in the theories of civil conflict, disagreement, and dissension. He has published several articles on these topics in American Political Thought and the Political Science Reviewer. His current book project uses Machiavelli's theory of civil conflict, both its revolutionary defense of class conflict’s role in free politics and his often-overlooked critique of party politics, to develop new resources for thinking about civil conflict in a political world in which neither consensus nor mutual understanding seem achievable. 

Beyond Dr. Smith’s work on Machiavelli, his research on the conceptualization of civil conflict, and the deployment of theories of conflict by political theorists past and present to overcome, domesticate, or embrace the irascible part of politics deals with matters of central concern to scholars across the social sciences. His work on conflict draws on scholarship in History, empirical subfields in Political Science, Psychology, and other fields in the Social Sciences intersecting with research on topics including race, class, gender, political parties, civil war, and civil violence.