Benjamin Smith
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Washington, 2002
Email:bbsmith@polisci.ufl.edu
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Benjamin Smith, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. U. Washington 2002) holds a joint appointment with the Asian Studies Program. His teaching interests include comparative politics, research design and the comparative method, Southeast Asian politics, authoritarian durability, and communal conflict in Asia and elsewhere. His research interests include the politics of communal violence, corruption and economic development, state formation, regime change and democratization. His first book, Hard Times in the Land of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia, is forthcoming in 2007 with Cornell University Press. Smith's research has been published in World Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of International Affairs, and in various edited volumes. From 2002 to 2004, he was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His research has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the United States-Indonesia Society, and the American Institute for Iranian Studies. Smith's current research focuses on communal violence and on the relationship between political corruption and economic development.
