Eric Slauter
Eric Slauter is Deputy Dean of the Humanities, Associate Professor of English, and Director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago. A specialist in American cultural and political history, Slauter is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society. He has chaired the faculty board of the University of Chicago Press and served as visiting editor at the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American history. The author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution and essays on the language of rights and equality in early America, he is completing a book on the origins, meanings, and afterlives of the Declaration of Independence, based on lectures recorded for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City. Slauter has taught courses and seminars on the history of the book in America at the University of Chicago, and is at work on Walden’s Carbon Footprint: People, Plants, Animals, and Machines in the Making of an American Classic.