Will SLAUTER
- Histoire du livre et de l’édition
- Histoire des médias
- Histoire du droit
I joined the faculty of Sorbonne Université in 2020. 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 retain an interest in the eighteenth century, though my recent projects have ventured into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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. I am currently co-editing a book with Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire on artistic culture and intellectual property in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, with contributions by art historians, legal scholars, and specialists of printing, photography, and the fine arts.