Peter Coviello

Professor of English

Spring 2013

  • Lesbian Personae (ENG 010)
  • The American Renaissance (ENG 251)
  • Advanced Independent Study and Honors in English (ENG 403)
Phone 2077253516
Title Professor
Department English
Work Location 101 Massachusetts Hall
E-Mail pcoviell@bowdoin.edu
Peter Coviello

 

Education

Ph.D., Cornell University, 1998.
B.A. Northwestern University, 1993

Prof Coviello has been at Bowdoin since 1998, where he specializes in American literature and queer studies. From 2002 to 2006 he was chair of the program in Gay and Lesbian Studies, and he served from 2006 to 2008 as Acting Director of the Program in Africana Studies. He is currently Chair of the English Department.

He is the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature, and the editor of Walt Whitman's Civil War memoir Memoranda During the War. His new book, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, is forthcoming from NYU Press.

Selected Publications

Books

Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, forthcoming from NYU Press

peter m. coviello: Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum LiteratureIntimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

Editor, Memoranda During the War by Walt Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Essays

“Disappointment, or, Thoreau in Love,” forthcoming in Unauthorized States: Antinomies of the Nation and Other Subversive Genealogies, ed. Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson

“Battle-Music: Melville and the Forms of War,” forthcoming in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Geoff Sanborn and Samuel Otter

“Desire My Pilot Is,” in Shakesqueer: The Queer Companion to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Duke University Press, 2010), 278-285.

"The Sexual Child; or, This American Life," Raritan 27:4 (Spring 2008): 134-157.

“How to Do Things with Joy,” theory@buffalo 12 (2008): 61-85. Special issue on “(Re)Visions of Excess: Language of the Outside”

"World Enough: Sex and Time in Recent Queer Studies," GLQ 13:2-3 (Spring/Summer 2007): 387-401. Special double issue on "Queer Temporalities," ed. Elizabeth Freeman

"Poe In Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery," ELH - English Literary History 70:3 (Fall 2003): 875-901. ( Access article in HTML » ) ( Access article in PDFPDF» )

Memoranda During the War"Intimacy and Affliction: DuBois, Race, and Psychoanalysis," MLQ - Modern Language Quarterly 64:1 (March 2003): 1-32. (access article in HTML ») ( access article in PDFPDF» )

"The American in Charity: 'Benito Cereno' and Gothic Anti-Sentimentality," Studies in American Fiction 30:2 (Autumn 2002): 155-180.

"Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America," Early American Literature 37:3 (Fall 2002): 439-468.

"Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attachment in Whitman," American Literature 73:1 (March 2001): 85-119. ( access article in PDF PDF» )

Recent Lectures

“Whitman’s Children” “Tomorrow’s Parties: A Queer Americanist Colloquium,” Bowdoin College, May 2010

“The Unspeakable Past: Sex Before Wilde in American Literature” Fordham University, March 2010

“The Tenderness of Beasts: Hawthorne and the American History of Sexuality” University of Texas at Austin, April 2009

“How to Do Things with Joy” Northwestern University, February 2009

“How to Do Things with Joy: Pynchon and Vineland” University of Sussex, October 2008

“Disappointment, or, Thoreau in Love” Penn State, January 2007

"No Covenants but Proximities: Intimacy and History"
Indiana University, Keynote Address for the Intimacy / Proximity national interdisciplinary graduate student conference, April 2005

"The Sexual Child; or, This American Life"
Johns Hopkins University, for the ELH Colloquium series, April 2005

"Intimacy and History"
Cornell University, for the Race, Sexuality, Culture, and Politics in the Literatures of the United States" conference, April 2005

"The Heart of a Stranger: Whitman, War, and the American History of Sexuality"
University of Connecticut, for the Rainbow Center speaker series, April 2005

"Intimacy in America: Notes on Affect and History"
Williams College, March 2005

"Whitman at War"
Harvard University (featured speaker for the American Literature and Culture Colloquium), November 2004

"Agonizing Affection: Belonging and Belief in Early American Literature"
University of Maine, Augusta (as part of the Old Fort Western's 250th anniversary distinguished speaker series), July 2004

"'Canker'd, Crude, Superstitious, and Rotten': Whitman's America and Our Own"
The Karofsky Faculty Encore Lecture, Bowdoin College Common Hour, January 2004

"Poe In Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery"
Johns Hopkins University (as part of the "Queer October" Series), October 2002

Exhibition Curated at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

"The Sexual Child," November - December, 1999.

Audio

Walt Whitman's Waraudio
On The Connection, from WBUR Boston and NPR
Hosted by: Dick Gordon. Show Originally Aired: 12/20/2004