Dr. Gregory Laski
Professor of English
Department of English
Director of American Studies
American Studies Minor
Bio
Gregory Laski teaches and writes about democracy, race, and civic life in American literature and culture, concerns that he considers inextricable from his past and present experiences in public service. Currently civilian Professor in the Department of English and Fine Arts, he was a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University during the 2017-18 academic year.
His scholarly and pedagogical interests were formed through his work as a teacher for and later director of Summerbridge Pittsburgh, a nonprofit program dedicated to achieving equality in education. He continues this social engagement as co-founder of the Democratic Dialogue Project, a Mellon grant-funded exchange between Air Force Academy and Colorado College students that seeks to bridge the military-civilian divide.
Laski's first book, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2017) won the American Literature Association’s Pauline Hopkins Society Scholarship Award in 2019. Reading the post-Reconstruction writings of American authors and activists as political theory in narrative form, the book recovers one of the bleakest periods in the nation’s racial history as a vibrant site for expanding our sense of what democracy can make possible. With D. Berton Emerson, he is editor of Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today (Oxford University Press, 2023), an interdisciplinary vocabulary to support democratic dialogue.
He has published articles and essays on the humanities, citizenship, teaching and learning, American and African American literature, and film in such journals as Callaloo, African American Review, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Pedagogy.
Laski is at work on a cultural history of revenge after the Civil War. An article drawn from this project has been published in American Literature; the piece won two national awards for best essay of the year and was supported by a Mellon Foundation longterm fellowship at the Newberry Library.
For more, please visit www.gregorylaski.com.
Education
Ph.D., English, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (2012)
M.A., English, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (2007)
B.A., English and Spanish, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana (2005)
Research and Scholarly Interests
Nineteenth-century American literature
African American literature
Critical Race Theory
Cultural Studies
Film
Political Philosophy
Composition
Publications
Books
Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today, co-edited with D. Berton Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Articles and Essays
“On First Reading Thomas Dixon in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today.” American Literary Realism 55, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 271-78.
“Tourgée on the Dangers of Reconciliation: Revenge in the Reconstruction-Era Novels.” In Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée, ed. Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine (New York: Fordham University Press, “Reconstructing America” series, 2022), 223-35.
“Frederick Douglass.” In American Literature in Transition, 1851-1877, ed. Cody Marrs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 27-41.
“Reconstructing Revenge: Race and Justice after the Civil War.” American Literature 91, no. 4 (December 2019): 751-81.
“Chesnutt as Political Theorist: Imagining Democracy and Social Justice in the Literature Classroom.” In Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig (New York: Modern Language Association, 2017), 130-37.
Introduction to “‘Democracy’ in the American Nineteenth Century.” Co-written with D. Berton Emerson. J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5, no. 2 (2017): 361-68.
“Citizens, Soldiers, and Future Selves: On the Democratic Functions of the Literary Imagination (Notes from a ‘Pure Civilian’).” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 17, no. 1 (2017): 77-105.
“‘No Reparation’: Accounting for the Enduring Harms of Slavery in Stephen Crane’s The Monster.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 1 (2013): 37-69.
Introduction to “Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium.” Co-written with Melissa Asher Daniels. African American Review 44, no. 4 (2012): 567-70.
“Falling Back into History: The Uncanny Trauma of Blackface Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 33, no. 4 (2010): 1093-1115.
Editorial Work
“Democracy in the American Nineteenth Century.” Coordinator, with D. Berton Emerson, of this forum featuring contributions by Danielle Allen, Sandra Gustafson, Jason Frank, Kelvin Black, and James Sanders. J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5, no. 2 (2017): 361-403.
“Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium.” Coordinator, with Melissa Asher Daniels, of this special forum on Kenneth W. Warren’s recent book featuring papers by Russ Castronovo, John Ernest, Sharon P. Holland, Soyica Diggs Colbert, and Adam Bradley, along with a response by Warren. African American Review 44, no. 4 (2012): 567-91.
Reviews and Roundtables
Review of A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, ed. Neil Roberts (University of Kentucky Press, 2018). Political Theory (2019)
“Post Transbellum?” Invited contribution to a roundtable on Cody Marrs’s Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Common-place 17, no. 1 (2016).
Review of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs, ed. Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren (University of Georgia Press, 2013). American Literary History Online Review, Series IV (2015).
Public Writing
“Defining ‘Democracy.’” Co-written with D. Berton Emerson. Oxford University Press Blog, November 8, 2022.
“The Power of Dialogue.” Co-written with K. Elizabeth Coggins. The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2017.
“Measuring Racial Progress, Past and Present.” Black Perspectives: The Blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, June 1, 2017.
“Remembering Montrell Jackson’s Ethic of Mutuality.” Oxford University Press Blog, August 11, 2016.