Dr Halikowski Smith studied at Cambridge University and Johns Hopkins University, and defended his doctorate at the Istituto Universitario Europeo in Fiesole, Italy. Before joining Swansea University, he taught at the Central European University in Budapest and occupied the Vasco da Gama Chair in Portuguese Overseas History at Brown University, Rhode Island, for three years. He is an Assistant to the Editors of the Electronic Journal of Portuguese History.

Dr Halikowski Smith is a member of Clioh-world and MEMO (Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research) and has been invited to join the Board for the Centro de Alem Mar in Lisbon.

Current research

Dr Halikowski Smith's research interests are  broadly related to European expansion and the encounters of different civilizations. He is particularly interested in the Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean and the pre-colonial political and social configurations that presence engendered. He is currently completing a book entitled Unleashing Desires: Portugal and the European Spice Trade, 1480-1580  to be published by Brill.

He has been involved in several collaborative research networks and projects: the Triplex Confinium (University of Zagreb, Central European University, Universität Graz); Bombaim antes dos Britânicos (Centro de História Ultramarina, Universidade de Coimbra); and the Vasco da Gama  Programme (EUI, Italy).

Potential post-graduate students interested in the parallel histories of European colonial enterprises urged to contact him.

Recent conference papers and invited lectures

• ‘Atlantic Perspectives on Central European mining technologies at Schemnitz, 1668-1816’, 13th International Congress of 18th Century Studies, Graz, 26 July 2011.
• `The early East India Company in Indonesia and its language of state’, in Symposium on the East India Company and Language, City University, Hong Kong, 6-9 April 2011.
• ‘Diplomatic relations between Ayutthaya and Macao over the eighteenth century. The case of the 1721 embassy´, Luso-Asian diasporas conference, NUS Singapore, 29 September 2010.
• `A fresh look at what went wrong with the Eurasian spice trade, c. 1550-1800’, XIIIth International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History, Aix-en-Provence, 25 March 2010.
• `European National Libraries and Digitization in History’, in Contemporary History in the Digital Age, Conference on Digital Humanities organised by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance de l’Europe, Luxembourg, October 2009.
• `Seventeenth population movements in the seventeenth-century Portuguese Indies’. Instituto de Investigação Cíentifica Tropical, Lisbon, March 2009.

Principal research awards, fellowships, and prizes

• FLAD and Fundação Oriente scholarship to attend Luso-Asian diasporas conference and workshop in Singapore and Melaka (Malaysia), September 2010 (£1200)
• Two-month fellowship, Sonderforschungbereich (Collaborative Research Centre) 597, Bremen University, for work on early modern piracy, 2009-2010 (5000 euros)
• Erasmus Teaching Mobility Grant, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, Lisbon, March-April 2009 (£1000)
• Visiting Fellow, European University Institute, 2008-09