Peter Coviello

Peter Coviello is a scholar, critic, and essayist. He specializes in American literature, as well as queer studies, critical theory, and the devotional life of imperial modernity.

He is the author of six books, including Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago), a finalist for the 2020 John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book Prize; Long Players (Penguin), 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 (NYU), a 2013 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. His Vineland Reread (Columbia) was listed among the New York Times’s “New and Noteworthy” titles for January of 2021 and his most recent book, Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things (Chicago), was selected as a notable book for 2023 by The Millions, The Lambda Literary Review, and the Chicago Tribune. His scholarship has appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, ELH, American Literature, Film Quarterly, GLQ, History of the Present, J19, and elsewhere. In 2017, he was appointed a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton.

The editor of Walt Whitman’s Civil War memoir Memoranda During the War and of the Penguin Classics edition of Herman Melville’s short fiction, he writes widely as well for national and public-facing venues like The Believer, N+1, Raritan, Frieze, Public Books, Parapraxis, and (most recently) The Best American Essays, where he has published on pop heartbreak, queer friendship, fascism and antifascism, higher education, stepparenthood, poetry, Prince. He taught for sixteen years at Bowdoin College, where he was Chair of the departments of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Africana Studies, and English, and since 2014 has been at UIC, where he is Professor and Head of English.

He advises work on 19^th- and 20^th-century American literatures and queer studies, as well as literary theory, religion and secularism, the history of sexuality, gender studies, poetry and poetics, modernism, and creative nonfiction.

His next book, After Ahab – about Melville, tyranny, and a capitalist world-system lurching toward scalar reformulation – is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

 
Books
Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Vineland Reread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), inaugural volume in the “Rereadings” series.

Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and The Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), in the “Class 200: New Studies in Religion” series.

Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).

Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), in the “America and the Long 19^th Century” series.

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

Some recent essays:

“Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani,” LitHub, November 7, 2025

(Selected for the 2026 Best American Essays)

“Memos of Blood and Fire,” N+1, March 7, 2025

“A Brief Queer History of Going to Bed with Your Hot Friends,” Public Books, February 27, 2025.

“Apocalypse Later: How the World Used to End,” Parapraxis, Issue 05: “Sublimations,” 2025.

“Praisesongs, Descants, Whatever,” Chicago Review, in the “Memoir” dossier, January 28, 2022.

“Anthony and Carmela Get Vaccinated,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, April 19, 2021.

“The Novel and the Secret Police,” Boston Review, September 11, 2020.