Robert O. Smith

The Rev. Robert O. Smith, PhD, is an internationally known administrator, scholar, theologian, and minister. He is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). He currently serves as Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

In addition to many academic articles, Smith is the author of More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford, 2013) and editor, with Göran Gunner, of Comprehending Christian Zionism: Perspectives in Comparison (Fortress, 2014). Smith is currently completing three book projects co-researched and -written with Aja Y. Martinez, a professor of Latina-Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The first of these three books, The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement, was published by NYU Press in March 2025; the second, Harmony and Harassment: A New Critical Race Theory Story, will be published by the University of California Press in 2026. An additional book is being developed on the history of the Razzouk family, a Coptic Christian family that has been providing pilgrim tattoos in the Holy Land since 1300.