Tim Smith-Laing

Super Tutor

Tim is a writer, arts critic, and teacher based in London.

 After taking his BA in English literature from Pembroke College, Cambridge, he moved to Oxford, to take an MSt in early modern literature at Balliol College, followed by a DPhil in late medieval and early modern mythography at Merton College. Outside Oxford, he undertook research at the École Normale Supérieure and teaching at Sciences Politiques in Paris. As a college lecturer in literature at Jesus College, Oxford for three years, he taught early modern literature, cultural history, and the theory of criticism, before leaving academia to concentrate on writing full time in 2013.

Since leaving academia, he has published on subjects ranging from early modern philosophy to Hieronymus Bosch, Paul Valéry, and The Monkees. A book critic at The Telegraph, he is also a regular contributor of features and reviews on art for Apollo and Frieze, and have published fiction, poetry and essays in The Junket, as well as teaching Latin in state primary schools for the Latin Programme. He is a regular guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art and currently hold a post as a senior lecturer on the joint Royal Academy and University of Maastricht Executive Master in Cultural leadership.

His main current projects are a novel based on the life of eighteenth-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, and a cultural history of chance, titled Fortuna: The Lives of Lady Luck from Ancient Athens to Quantum Physics.

​