Eric Slauter is a specialist in early American cultural, intellectual, legal, and political history. He has published The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009) and a series of essays on the language of rights and equality in early America. Slauter recently recorded 12 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. He is Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, 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.