John Charles Smith has been Fellow and Tutor in Linguistics at St Catherine’s College since 1997. Before returning to Oxford, where he was an undergraduate and graduate student, he held appointments at the Universities of Surrey, Bath, and Manchester. He has also held visiting appointments in Paris, Limoges, Berlin, Melbourne, and Philadelphia.

His main field of interest is historical morphosyntax, and he has published widely on agreement, refunctionalization, deixis, and the evolution of case and pronoun systems, with particular reference to Romance, although he has also worked on other language families, including Germanic, Austronesian, and the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia.

He is Secretary of the International Society for Historical Linguistics, and is currently co-editing the Cambridge History of the Romance Languages.