John Durham Peters is the inaugural María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and a professor in the Film and Media Studies Program. He joined the Yale community in January 2017 following three decades on the University of Iowa faculty (most recently as the A. Craig Baird Professor of Communication Studies). A media historian and theorist, Peters earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1986. He is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and reviews, as well as five books on the history, culture, and constructs of communication. His work has been translated widely for international audiences—into Albanian, Lithuanian, and Hebrew, among other languages.
Since arriving at Yale, Peters has taught a first-year seminar, entitled “Literature, Media, and Weather”; a graduate course, “Media & Media Theory, 1945-75”; and an undergraduate lecture on the “Philosophy of Digital Media.” His next book, Promiscuous Knowledge: Image and Information in Historical Perspective, co-authored with the late Kenneth Cmiel, will be published by the University of Chicago Press.
From his office in Linsly-Chittenden, Peters spoke about the joys of teaching at Yale, the value in forging new collaborations, and his ongoing quest for a game of ultimate frisbee in New Haven.
Q. Why Yale? After so many years at the University of Iowa, what inspired you to come here?
A. To shake things up—to try something new. I really liked the teaching flexibility that Yale offers: at Iowa, I taught the same large lecture course—200 students; one time it was 400 students—every fall. And I did that 12 times in 16 years. The curriculum required that course. Here, I’ve been teaching a first-year seminar, a bizarre, interdisciplinary class in which we can read poems, look at the history of science, go to the British art center to look at Turner and Constable, do all kinds of weird mixes of things. And of course it’s a lot of work, but I love that Yale, as Peter Salovey says, should be “the research university most committed to teaching.” I love teaching, so that’s been exciting. But also, my father taught at Harvard, so [I had a] sense of the grass being greener: I wanted to see what academic life was like at the very best.
Q. Describe the experiences of your first year teaching at Yale. And what is the reciprocity between teaching and your own research and writing?
A. The English department has been a complete delight. I was an English major and have always been a lover of poetry and novels. At Yale, I can actually teach poetry. I’m teaching Moby-Dick next semester, which is very exciting. And it is great to be with old friends and new in the Film and Media Studies Program as well. My first-year seminar is partly designed to take advantage of cool things at Yale: see the British art center, go to the Beinecke…. We went to the earth observing lab, and Professor Ron Smith, a meteorologist, gave us a lecture on clouds. It’s an academic cliché that teaching informs research and research informs teaching, but it’s totally true in my case. I’ve also been teaching a lecture course on the philosophy of digital media. I have 20 to 24 students and two wonderful teaching fellows. In Iowa to have two TFs I would have to have had 150 students. And it’s intimate enough that I haven’t felt like I have to do PowerPoints but can really focus on the lectures themselves. This class could easily turn into a short book. It’s been so generative to ask: What is the meaning of digital media in this particular moment? What do digital media mean for politics, economics, and power? What do they mean for relationships, for love? for art or the natural world, including our relationships with animals? And the last week was on theology, because cyberspace is ultimately about religion or about God-talk; the way we talk about these machines is often the way we talk about God. My argument was that we should admit that we have a theology of the digital era, but it’s a bad theology—a theology controlled by corporations. So let’s get a richer theology to try to think through what’s at stake here. It was really fun to teach. And the interdisciplinary quality of the students has been a complete delight. In this class, I had majors in mathematics and philosophy, computer science, history, economics, anthropology, and neuroscience, as well as several majors in English and film and media studies. And my first grad seminar, last spring, was a surprise: I had 25 students, so I had to split it into two sections. I had people from architecture and art history; French and East Asian languages and literatures; English, obviously; German. It was a really interesting mix.
Q. What has surprised you the most at Yale—or what have you learned about Yale so far?
A. What have I learned? Overabundance. You can’t go to everything you want to go to. I’ve noticed that scheduling goes in waves, so last week there were four things going on at the same time that I wanted to attend. I’ve turned down about five invitations to travel in April just because I know there will be too much going on here; I don’t want to miss anything. So many of my friends and colleagues from other places have come through Yale just in the past year—it’s remarkable. And I’ve been able to meet a lot of people; there were a lot of people whose work I’ve known and now I’ve gotten to put a face to the name.
Q. Have there been any new collaborations to emerge?
A. I am a fellow in two interdisciplinary adventures, the OpEd Project and the Whitney Humanities Center, so I’ve been able to meet a lot of new people through those. The OpEd encourages us to seek potential collaborators to write short pieces with and I’ve had some very nice chats with fascinating people. I am interested in everything, so we’ll have to see where I finally settle to collaborate!
Q. I’m curious about the book that you’re working on now (Promiscuous Knowledge: Image and Information in Historical Perspective). Can you tell me a little bit about it?
A. The book’s first author is Ken Cmiel. And the interesting thing is that Ken Cmiel died in 2006. So this is me trying to finish a book that Ken started in the 1990s. He was a very close friend of mine—my best friend, probably—and he left me all of his books. And he and I often talked about a book that he was writing that was his own take on media history. So I’m trying to finish it in a different voice and in a different era than it started in. Maybe 10 years ago I thought, “I can do this”; and five years ago, I gave up; and a few years ago, I thought, “I can do this,” and I got a book contract, and I moved to Yale. I thought it was almost done, and now we have a new inhabitant of the White House, which somehow gives new significance to all these questions Cmiel was raising—about confidence in experts; what is authority; who gets to say what truth is; what counts as knowledge? So the book is a historical approach to the question of how knowledge has grown leaky in particular moments and then how it’s been shored up and mobilized and made trustworthy and credible. It’s interesting—I have to do a lot of delicate surgery to rewrite it for the moment we’re in now.
Q. Is there anything you’d like your FAS colleagues to know about you?
A. [Pulling up a video on his computer, in which two teams are playing ultimate Frisbee in the falling snow, and pointing at the screen…] So, that’s me; this is last Saturday at Rice Field in East Rock Park. The hardest thing moving to Yale has been losing the ultimate frisbee group that I had in Iowa City. It was a really good community: church, neighborhood, university. I’ve been trying to get a local group together to play all season, so getting people to play in the snow is a major victory.
Reported and written by Alison Coleman for the FAS Dean’s Office