ORIANNE SMITH

Dr. Orianne Smith is Professor of English and Affiliate Professor of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. She is currently serving as the Co-Chair of the 2025-2026 Middle States Accreditation Self-Study Steering Committee. Her teaching and research interests include gender and Romanticism, the Gothic, and the connections between religion, superstition, and magic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her book, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786 -1826, was published with Cambridge University Press (2013; paperback 2015). This book received the First Book Award from the British Association of Romantic Studies in 2015. Her second book, Romanticism Bewitched: Witchcraft, Revolution and the Female Demonic, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Since joining UMBC in 2005, Dr. Smith has worked in close collaboration with campus stakeholders across the university in multiple leadership roles to create transformational policies, programs, and resources. She has served as Chair of English (2012-2018); Chair of the Research Council (2010); Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee (2015-2017); Graduate Program Director (2018-2024); Vice President of the Faculty Senate (2019); Faculty Senate President (2020-2022); and Special Assistant to the Provost for Special Faculty Initiatives (2020-2024). 

Dr. Smith is a committed teacher who sees the classroom as a collaborative, inclusive space in which she and her students engage with literary texts on a deeper level, where they exchange ideas about what these texts meant in their own time to their authors and contemporaries, and what they mean to us now.