Marc Smith is professor of Latin paleography, the history of writing in the Roman alphabet, at two leading academic institutions in Paris, the École nationale des chartes and the École pratique des hautes études (PSL), and the current president of the International Committee for Latin Paleography. His work focuses on the long-term evolution of writing in the West in its formal, technical, cultural, and cognitive dimensions, and his current project is a history of French and European writing models from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. He has lectured and taught widely in Europe and America, notably at the Newberry Library, the Getty Research Institute and Columbia University.