The State and the Work of Art

Eric Slauter is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at The University of Chicago. His current book project, The State as a Work of Art: Cultures of American Constitutionalism, 1776-1787, examines foundational links between aesthetics and politics in a society that feared the arts but developed a legal understanding of the artificiality of the state. Slauter has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2003-04. A Perfect Union…more or less