I specialize in early American cultural, intellectual, and literary history, with additional research and teaching interests in a range of fields and methods: legal history; the history of political thought; book history; visual and material culture studies; quantitative analysis; the history of slavery, abolition, and emancipation; and Atlantic history.  My scholarship focuses on transformations in thought and behavior in the eighteenth century.  My first book, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, highlights neglected cultural contexts that made constitutionalism possible and meaningful in revolutionary America.  A second project, currently called A Cultural History of Natural Rights in America, 1689-1789, seeks to explain how and why ordinary people came to believe they had rights.  I’m also presently co-editing a collection of essays on comparative colonial American studies and researching a short book on Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved “African painter” who lived and served in Boston on the eve of emancipation.

My graduate seminars include period courses (“Enlightenment and Revolution in America” and “The Language of Rights in Eighteenth-Century America”) and methods courses (“The Social Life of American Literature: Studies in the History of the Book—1500 to the Present”).  At the undergraduate level I’ve recently offered a survey of American literary and cultural history before 1850 and a course on the culture and politics of the American Revolution.  I currently serve as a faculty sponsor for the American Cultures Workshop, as a coordinator of the Seminar in Early American History and Culture at the Newberry Library, and as director of the Karla Scherer Center, a newly created hub for the exciting, multidisciplinary study of American culture at the University of Chicago.

• The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).  Forthcoming.
• “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” published simultaneously (with responses by Elizabeth Maddox Dillon, Alison Games, Eliga H. Gould, and Bryan Waterman) in Early American Literature 43:1 (Winter 2008) and the William and Mary Quarterly 65:1 (January 2008).  Forthcoming.
• “The Declaration of Independence and the New Nation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, edited by Frank Shuffelton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
• “The Dividing Line of American Federalism: Partitioning Sovereignty in the Early Republic,” in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1600-1900, edited by Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 61-88.
• “Written Constitutions and Unenumerated Rights.”  Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 116: 2 (October 2006): 277-297.  Reprinted in Liberty!/Égalité!/¡Independencia!: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas 1776-1838 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 2007), 57-78.
• “Being Alone in the Age of the Social Contract.”  William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 62:1 (January 2005): 31-66.
• “Craft and Objecthood” (review essay on verbal and material culture studies), Early American Literature 39:2 (June 2004): 363-378.
• “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley.”  Early American Studies 2:1 (Spring 2004): 81-122.

• A Cultural History of Natural Rights, 1689-1789.
• The Hemispheric Turn: Comparing Colonialism in the Americas, edited with Lisa Voigt.
• “Reading and Radicalization: Print, Causality, and the American Revolution,” in The Atlantic World of Print in the Age of Franklin, edited by James Green and Rosalind Remer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, in preparation).
• “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” in Invisible Subjects? Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World (1630-1890), edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Collection under review).

John Singleton Copley, Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) (1765) Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Contact Information: Department of English The University of Chicago 1115 East 58th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Office: Walker 506 Phone: (773) 702-7744 Fax: (773) 702-2495 eslauter@uchicago.edu