Will Slauter

Assistant Professor of History

I attended Northwestern University (B.A.) and Princeton University (M.A., Ph.D.) and have 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 I taught at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and at Columbia University, where I was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

I study the history of media and communication in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. Drawing inspiration from the fields of bibliography and history of the book, I am interested in how texts of all kinds come to take the form that they do, and how those forms ultimately matter to the way people understand events. My 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, I reconstruct how news reports evolved as they traveled from one place to another. While revising this study for publication I have begun new research on the history of intellectual property in journalism. My 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. I have 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.

I am happy to be joining the Department of History as part of FSU’s cluster hiring initiative in the History of Text Technologies (http://hott.fsu.edu/). In the Fall of 2009 I will be 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."

				Department of History >> Faculty & Staff >> Faculty in Alphabetical Order >> Will Slauter
				Will Slauter Assistant Professor of History I attended Northwestern University (B.A.) and Princeton University (M.A., Ph.D.) and have 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 I taught at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and at Columbia University, where I was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. I study the history of media and communication in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. Drawing inspiration from the fields of bibliography and history of the book, I am interested in how texts of all kinds come to take the form that they do, and how those forms ultimately matter to the way people understand events. My 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, I reconstruct how news reports evolved as they traveled from one place to another. While revising this study for publication I have begun new research on the history of intellectual property in journalism. My 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. I have 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. I am happy to be joining the Department of History as part of FSU’s cluster hiring initiative in the History of Text Technologies (http://hott.fsu.edu/). In the Fall of 2009 I will be 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."