Will SLAUTER
- Histoire du livre et de l’édition
- Histoire des médias
- Histoire du droit
I joined the faculty of Sorbonne Université in 2020, after teaching at Columbia University, Florida State University, Université Paris 8 – Saint Denis, and Université Paris Cité. My research interests include the history of publishing, the history of news and journalism, and the history of copyright law in the United States and the United Kingdom.
I was trained as a historian of the eighteenth century; my dissertation, supervised by Robert Darnton at Princeton, focused on the circulation of news between North America, Great Britain, and France during the American Revolution. I maintain an interest in the eighteenth century, though recent projects have also ventured into the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. My research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Institut universitaire de France.
My book Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford, 2019) tells the story of the centuries-long struggle to “protect” news by treating it as a form of intellectual property. Beginning with the earliest printed news publications in the sixteenth century and ending with an epilogue on the digital age, the book charts the evolution of British and American
copyright laws in relation to shifts in technology, business strategy, and journalistic practice. A broader interest in how historical research can help to illuminate recent shifts in the media landscape has led me to contribute to collaborative projects on the political economy of journalism and the history of information since the early modern era.
My current research focuses on copyright law and the circulation of images during the nineteenth century. With Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, I recently co-edited the open-access book Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Open Book Publishers, 2021), which includes contributions by art historians, legal scholars, book historians, and specialists of printing, photography, and the fine arts. This project was supported by the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and the Institut universitaire de France.
I am a member of the editorial board of the journal Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, and co-editor of the book series 17 th and 18 th Century Studies at Manchester University Press (in partnership with the Société d’études anglo-américaines du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle).