John Peters
Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies
Phone number:
+1 (203) 4326894
Email:
Research Areas:
Media theory, media history (esp. early modern, nineteenth-century, postwar, and contemporary), environmental humanities (especially weather and oceans), critical digital studies, with broad interdisciplinary interests in art, literature, music, religion,
John teaches and writes on media history and theory. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel (all published by the University of Chicago Press). He is working on a media history of weather, and has advised or co-advised over three dozen doctoral dissertations.
