Eric Slauter, Director
Eric Slauter is Deputy Dean of the Humanities and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate professor in the Department of English, an associate faculty member in the Divinity School, and serves as the founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.
A specialist in early American cultural, intellectual, legal, and political history, Slauter earned a PhD at Stanford University and has held research fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, and the Newberry Library. He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and an elected fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He has chaired the faculty board of the University of Chicago Press and served for a year as visiting editor at the William and Mary Quarterly , the leading journal of early American history.
Slauter is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution , which received honorable mention in the MLA Prize for a First Book. He has published articles on the “trade gap” between history and literature in Atlantic studies, a short biography of the enslaved eighteenth-century painter Scipio Moorhead, and a series of essays on the language of rights and equality in early America. He recently recorded twelve lectures on the Declaration of Independence for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York and is completing a book on the Declaration’s origins, meanings, and afterlives. Over the past decade he has also given invited talks on a research project that blends environmental, labor, and literary history, “Walden’s Carbon Footprint: People, Plants, Animals, and Machines in the Making of an American Classic ,” and he is preparing a book addressed to a general audience.
Nolan Kishbaugh, Center Administrator
kishbaugh@uchicago.edu
As administrator of The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, Nolan manages the Center’s communications, finances, and daily operations. Nolan previously earned an M.A from the University of Chicago’s MAPH program, focusing on contemporary analytic philosophy. Outside of his work at UChicago, Nolan enjoys reading, gardening, and discovering new interests. As a native of Arizona, he also loves exploring Chicago and attending cultural events.
