Latest:
“The Civics of Higher Education? How three Pittsburgh-area colleges are reclaiming the campus as a space for citizen preparation,” Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine (Summer 2025): 94-98 (published online August 20, 2025)
Reported Features:
“Black Sewickley residents preserve their surprising history through story and film,” PublicSource, January 2, 2025 (republished in New Pittsburgh Courier, January 8, 2025)
“The Trees, a new play by Agnes Borinsky, takes root at Point Park University’s Conservatory of Performing Arts,” onStage Pittsburgh, October 4, 2024
“August Wilson’s Radio Golf explores race, class, and gentrification on the Hill,” PublicSource, August 12, 2024 (republished in Belt Magazine, September 9, 2024; Golden Quill Award Finalist)
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)
Interviews:
“Searching for the Humanity, No Matter How Good or Evil, of Every Character,” interview with author Nathan Harris, Electric Literature, September 11, 2025
“America is Faustian: An Interview with Ed Simon,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 8, 2024
Book Reviews:
“A return to Reconstruction,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 7, 2025 (online and Sunday print edition)
“The Soul of Pittsburgh shimmers in Ed Simon’s new collection of essays,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 8, 2024 (online); June 9, 2024 (Sunday print edition)
“The Furies Reconsidered,” Public Seminar, June 3, 2024
“How Does Forgiveness Heal? On Myisha Cherry’s Failures of Forgiveness,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 14, 2024
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).
Theater Reviews:
“An exhilarating ‘STOMP’ thunders into the Benedum Center — but only for a beat,” onStage Pittsburgh, October 19, 2024
“Pittsburgh Symphony’s ‘Home Alone In Concert’ Hits All the Right Pre-Holiday Notes,” onStage Pittsburgh, November 23, 2024
Essays:
“Beyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy?” Public Books, November 1, 2024
“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.
Scholarly Articles/Book Chapters:
“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.
GREGORY LASKI 