Dr. Will Slauter

Dr. Slauter attended Northwestern University (B.A.) and Princeton University (M.A., Ph.D.) and has been a visiting student at University College London, the École Normale Supérieure, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Before coming to Florida State, Dr. Slauter taught at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and at Columbia University, where he was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Dr. Slauter studies the history of media and communication in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. His dissertation, supervised by Robert Darnton at Princeton, focused on international news in the age of the American Revolution. Comparing newspapers printed throughout Europe, Great Britain and North America, Dr. Slauter reconstructs how news reports evolved as they traveled from one place to another. While revising this study for publication he has begun new research on the history of intellectual property in journalism. His goal is to understand long-term transformations in attitudes toward the ownership (and copyright) of news reports alongside changes in the ways journalists work with texts. Dr. Slauter has also started another project that deals with a very different kind of news publication—the London bills of mortality—and their role during a very different kind of event—the “Great Plague” of 1665.

In the Fall of 2009 Dr. Slauter is teaching a survey course, the “History of Media from Gutenberg to the Internet,” as well as an honors seminar called “Intellectual Property in Historical Perspective.”