My name is Eric Drummond Smith.

I am an Appalachian - born and raised in Bluefield, West Virginia, I spent summers in Bland County Virginia. Since I graduated from high school I have lived all over the mountains - around six years in old Watauga (that corner of the mountains centered around the meeting point of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia) a couple years in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and around eight years in the orange city of Knoxville, Tennessee.  I currently live in southwest Virginia in the little town of Abingdon. 

Education

I have been lucky enough to have learned a lot of things from a lot of people.  Of course today I am an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, but there are other schools I’d like to draw your attention to, if you wouldn’t mind, notably: 

Emory & Henry College: My baccalaureate institution - prepared me for a life of reading and writing till my eyes hurt and my fingers hurt, well, more. Triple majored in political science, art, and geography. 

The University of Virginia in Charlottesville: My masters institution, I read for East Asian studies, focusing on Chinese politics, history, philosophy, and art.  

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville: My doctoral institution, I read for political science, testing in the fields of international relations and comparative politics and specializing in the origins of conflict. 

I also owe debts to some other great schools, notably Beloit College, where I attended intensive language training for Mandarin Chinese, and Maryville College, where I was an adjunct professor for several years and learned the differences between teaching at a research institution and teaching at a liberal arts institution. 

Politics

When it comes to politics I am particularly interested in a few subjects.  I love taxonomy, the Aristotelian endeavor of cataloging institutions and structures that precedes the comparative process.  I also am intractably interested in regime change and the origins of war - that moment when a system shifts from being static and stable and enormously transformative forces of violence erupt and, in particular, the quiet decision to actually shift from the former to the latter.   And then there is political communication, or more accurately, propaganda, that point where the arts and politics are so deeply inter-meshed that they can hardly be distinguished from one another. Finally, I love the philosophy of politics, especially classical and early modern Western and premodern East Asian. 

I love to write but have far too little time to do so frequently - the travails of working at a tiny liberal arts college, I suppose.  My recent work is concentrating on two main subjects - first, I am slowly pushing forward on a book looking at the subject of regime change in early Chinese thought (Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties). Secondly, I am playing with a few papers on the relationship of the liberal arts to civic virtue, inspired in particular, by thinkers like Confucius, Aristotle, and Machiavelli.

I also try to do a good amount of community service when it comes to my politics - beyond classroom teaching (which is always my first passion) I often work with various newspapers and television stations in the region and I try to visit local high schools and organizations and simply answer questions or give lectures on whatever subject they care to know about.  I suppose that summarizes my ethic as a political scientist - I see myself as a deeply political animal, but I try to remain aloof - the gadfly as opposed to the candidate. 

Art

I describe myself as having two careers - I'm a political scientist, as I mentioned above, and I'm a fine artist (check out my artist's statement here).  If you think the statement is too long, well, my work is weird and ludicrous and funny and dark - pop surrealist neo-expressionism, and I sometimes struggle with the right way to express it. Apologies.