Gregory Laski is the Walter H. Annenberg–Edmund P. Joyce College Professor of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy. He is the author of Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery and co-editor, with D. Berton Emerson, of Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteenth Century and Today. He is at work on a book called Thinking Like a Citizen: Why Civic Communication Matters for 21st-Century Democratic Life and How We Can Achieve It.