Peter Coviello
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences | English
Peter Coviello Heading link
Peter Coviello
Peter Coviello is a scholar of American literature and queer theory, whose work addresses the entangled histories of sex, devotion, and intimate life in imperial modernity. A writer of criticism, scholarship, and literary nonfiction, he is the author of six books, including Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, a finalist for the 2020 John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book Prize; Long Players, a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM’s Ten Best Books of 2018; and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, a 2013 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. His newest book, Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things, was selected as a “Most Anticipated” book by both The Millions and the Lambda Literary Review, and as a notable title for 2023 by The Seminary Co-op, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. He taught for many years at Bowdoin College and since 2014 has been at UIC, where he is Professor and Head of English.
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Peter Coviello
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Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches From An Age Of Last Things.
University of Chicago Press
Is There God After Prince? is a book about loving things (books, records, people) in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster, an endstrickenness every twenty-first-century day has made harder to ignore. In essays that survey pieces of culture across a clamoring and expansive range – from novels and poems to movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos, and songs from the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis – Peter Coviello asks what it can mean to love such trifling and beautiful things, even now, in the midst of worlds so glutted with planet-sized calamity. Moving, mordant, sparking with caustic intelligence and an unsurrendered joyousness, Is There God After Prince? shows what criticism can do – how it yet might speak to us – in a time of ruin and collapse, an age of Last Things.