Gregory Laski

Biography

Gregory Laski is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce College Professor of American Studies and Journalism, and Director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy. He is an award-winning scholar, teacher, and journalist whose work focuses on culture and civic life in the United States, past and present.

Laski is the author of the book Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the American Literature Association’s Pauline E. Hopkins Society Scholarship Award, and co-editor, with D. Berton Emerson, of Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today (Oxford University Press, 2023), a collection of critical terms for civic dialogue. His Pittsburgh Quarterly story about the civics of higher education won a 2026 Golden Quill Award given by the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, and his Public Source story examining the complex racial history of a Pittsburgh suburb recently was awarded first place in the Inclusion and Representation in Features category of the Society for Features Journalism Excellence-in-Features journalism awards.

Laski’s reported features, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Colorado Sun, among other outlets.

Currently he is researching two books. "Reconstructing Revenge," a work of narrative nonfiction, explains why the stories that Americans told about revenge after the Civil War matter for ideas about racial justice today. An essay-length portion of this project was published in American Literature in December 2019 and was honored with two national prizes: the 1921 Prize, awarded by the American Literature Society, and the Norman Foerster Prize, given to the best essay published annually in American Literature. Research for this book has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Longterm Fellowship at the Newberry Library. "Thinking Like a Citizen" engages scholarship on civic education and democratic theory to chart a 21st-century agenda for civil dialogue across difference and develops a model of journalism as a form of civic education. One piece of this project appeared in Public Books; another is forthcoming in American Scholar.

Laski holds a BA in English and Spanish from the University of Notre Dame and PhD in English from Northwestern University.

For more information please visit his personal website.