Julia Smith
Julia Smith first came to St Andrews as a temporary lecturer in 1982-83, and returned as Reader in Mediaeval History in 1995 to 2005. She has also held posts at Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow and Oxford, as well as in the US. The following account of her time at St Andrews has been drawn from an interview with her in 2021.
Julia Smith vividly remembers being interviewed for her first position at the University of St Andrews. The interview took place in the Hebdomadar’s room, and she was seated at one side of a long table with her interviewers along the opposite side. It was a very bright and sunny day and her interviewers sat between her and the window.
‘My overwhelming memory of the interview is staring at these three or four people silhouetted against the light so I that I could hardly see them,’ Julia recalls.
Julia came to St Andrews in 1982 as a temporary lecturer in Mediaeval History and returned as Reader in Mediaeval History in 1995. She left in 2005 to take up the position of Edwards Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of Glasgow, moving from there to Oxford in 2016, where she is now Chichele Professor of Mediaeval History. Her research interests centre on late antique and early mediaeval history, mediaeval saints, and women and gender in the early Middle Ages.
Julia’s search for her first academic position came the year after the Thatcher cuts in higher education, and she felt lucky to get a one-year position at the University of Sheffield while finishing her doctorate. When that contract came to an end, she notes that the only position available was a nine-month teaching contract at St Andrews.
On her arrival in St Andrews, having been brought up in London, Julia found that she needed time to adjust to life in a small community, and keenly felt the loss of anonymity in moving from a big city to such a small town.
‘I was being accosted by students wanting help with their essays when I was in the baker’s on a Saturday morning, which was bizarre. Nothing had equipped me to learn how to handle situations like that.’
She also found the atmosphere at St Andrews at that time very starchy and formal and felt that the student population was very different from that at the University of Sheffield. While Sheffield had been full of bright students keen to learn, many students at St Andrews were privately educated and self-confident English males, whom Julia felt were there to develop social networks. On the other hand, there was also a group of clever, but quiet, Scottish students, and the two groups did not mix socially. Julia describes St Andrews at that time as ‘a little bubble of Englishness with some Scottish students’ and she recalls that St Andrews was widely regarded as ‘the English University north of the border’.
Julia herself had completed her undergraduate degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, and took her doctorate at Corpus Christi, Oxford. Julia came from a family of scientists and had studied science subjects up to O-Level, but switched to History and Classics for A-Level. She had enjoyed reading history from an early age and was further inspired by her teacher at A-Level who had set Julia and her classmates to ‘do proper research from day one’. Julia’s mother had a PhD and so it was considered normal for a woman to go to university – in fact, Julia belongs to the third generation of university-educated women in her family.
At the end of the temporary position at St Andrews, Julia moved on to a three-year post at the University of Manchester and after that she became Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Trinity College, Hartford in Connecticut, a selective liberal arts college. Julia enjoyed working in this environment but missed the ‘intellectual rough and tumble’ that she realised she had thrived on in the UK, and particularly during her time at Manchester. She returned to St Andrews as Reader in Mediaeval History, a level of position which she feels she would not have attained if she had continued to work in the UK.
Arriving back in St Andrews in 1995, Julia now realised how different the atmosphere and the ethos were from the United States and how marginalised women were among the staff at the Scottish university. Julia then began to work closely with the Vice Principal then in charge of the School of History, and with the Human Resources department to develop an equal opportunities agenda. She became the University Lead for Equal Opportunities, a position for which she felt particularly suited, having worked in an environment which was much more gender balanced. During this time, Julia developed and ran a number of initiatives and events aimed at addressed inequalities, not just in terms of gender but also disability. These included a briefing session day for heads of schools and running forums where people could go along and share their experiences. Julia was disappointed that the university did not appoint anyone to succeed her when she stepped down from the role, which she felt indicated that the work she had done in this field had not been considered important enough to be continued.
Julia’s efforts to change some aspects of the first-year courses were unsuccessful, but felt she was able to teach what she liked at honours level. She started teaching courses on women’s history, in particular a course on women, family and gender in the early Middle Ages, based on teaching she had done in the States. When she found that very few men took the course, she modified the course to have more of a focus on men and gender, but still did not attract many male students to the course. In some ways, she recalls, this was beneficial, as she found that women students were able to ‘find a voice’ more readily in an all-female environment.
Julia recalls that because she came to St Andrews in a promoted position, she did not fit the usual typology of female academics, in which women were steered towards pastoral roles and not expected to pursue serious research, while the male staff were seen as the ‘high flying researchers’. Despite having revised the Masters programme, Julia was not permitted to teach its core courses, and she came into conflict with some male staff over whether the membership of appointment committees should acknowledge the high proportion of women in the Department. Julia stresses however that such issues were not unique to St Andrews at that time, and that her experiences at St Andrews helped to equip her for the challenges of the senior position she subsequently held at the University of Glasgow.
This life history was drafted by Morag Allan Campbell, who interviewed Julia in July, 2021. It was lightly revised by Julia in 2024.