Peter Coviello
Associate Professor of English, Acting Program Director of Africana Studies
Spring 2008
- Topics in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Empire of Feeling (AFRS 277)
- Lesbian Personae (ENG 020)
| Phone | (207) 725-3516 |
| Title | Associate Professor |
| Department | ENGLISH |
| 2nd Title | Program Director |
| 2nd Department | AFRICANA STUDIES |
| Work Location | 101 Massachusetts Hall |
| pcoviell@bowdoin.edu |
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1998.
Peter Coviello earned his B.A. in English from Northwestern University and went on to Cornell University where he earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. in English.
He has been at Bowdoin since 1998 where he has taught courses in nineteenth- and twentieth- century American literature, Africana Studies and Women's Studies. He is Acting Program Director of Africana Studies and from 2002 to 2006 was chair of the program in Gay and Lesbian Studies.
He is the author of "Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature," and the editor of a new edition of Walt Whitman's Civil War memoir "Memoranda During the War".
He recently presented the Karofsky Faculty Encore Lecture titled "Canker'd, Crude, Superstitious and Rotten'" Whitman's American and Our Own".
Teaching areas:
antebellum American literature; early American literature; poetry and poetic form; the Harlem Renaissance; psychoanalytic theory; lesbian and gay studies.
Research interests:
Intimacy and nationality in American literature and culture; the intimate life of race; race and psychoanalysis; American histories of sexuality, with particular focus on children and sexuality; music and vernacular utopias in American national life.
Selected Publications
Books:
Intimacy 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:
"The Sexual Child; or, This American Life," forthcoming in Raritan
"World Enough: Sex and Time in Recent Queer Studies," forthcoming in GLQ 13:2-3 (Spring/Summer 2007). 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 PDF
» )
"Intimacy and Affliction: DuBois, Race, and Psychoanalysis," MLQ - Modern Language Quarterly 64:1 (March 2003): 1-32. (access article in HTML ») ( access article in PDF» )
"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» )
Recent Lectures By Invitation:
"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
Recent Exhibitions Curated at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art
"The Sexual Child," November - December, 2000.
Audio
Walt Whitman's War
On The Connection, from WBUR Boston and NPR
Hosted by: Dick Gordon. Show Originally Aired: 12/20/2004