LAS English Department Head on how he connects with his community through language on and off the page

Name: Peter Coviello

Title: Professor and Head of English

Department: English

Tell me a little bit about your history at UIC:

I was hired at UIC just over ten years ago, after I’d spent 16 as a professor at a very, very different sort of place. (This was a small, private, monied college on the east coast.) I’d been a student and a young person in Chicago back in the 90s, and it has been about my favorite place in the world ever since. So when I got a chance to come back – and to get a sense of what the project not of private but public education might be like – I took it.

What role does research and furthering your own education play in your career?

I don’t know that there is a single part of my career that could be described as anything other than “furthering my own education with research.” To say a bit what I mean: I was trained as a scholar of American literature and something called “queer theory,” which is a set of concepts, methods, and arguments that attunes you to things like desire, attachment, the turbulent history of sexuality. I wrote a few scholarly books on these questions. But my interests keep expanding – so, eventually, I wrote a big book about Mormonism in the American nineteenth century; and then another about a living writer named Thomas Pynchon, and his delirious, heartsick novel of the incendiary 1960s; but at the same time I was also writing essays, a lot of them in what tend to be called “public-facing” venues, and eventually those became a whole book – a memoir, in fact, of all things – and then eventually I wrote another book of essays, in the mode of a kind of vernacular criticism. Every new bit of writing required leaning new concepts, new frameworks, new histories, and of course new skills.

What interests you about Liberal Arts and Sciences?

This answer is really about what I think the discipline of English is and does, but it applies to the liberal arts more generally I think.

I’m the Head of English, so I get asked about our “mission” at UIC a lot. Here’s what I say: Everything we do in the English Department is built upon the conviction that our job is to bring the absolutely highest caliber literary education imaginable – comprising the best of what has been known and said and written and argued – to a student body selected with as little regard for the distinctions of status, wealth, background, color, and need as can be found at any major institution of higher learning. Our abiding specialty is the intensive study of language, as formalized in centuries of works of literature. So our chief remit as scholars and teachers can be found in all that follows downstream from that: in questions of aesthetics, politics, media, history, knowledge – of all that transpires at the fractious interface of art and culture – as these questions are pursued with the greatest possible precision, and thoroughness, and clarity.

That, in essence, is what we do. We study the varying and sometimes contradictory ways that excursions into language can be transformed into meaning – and in our work as teachers and scholars we pay an especially exacting sort of attention to the processes by which such meaning is assembled, dispersed, freighted with joy or with anguish, and otherwise deployed into the larger world. Since I was a student (since I was a teenager!) I haven’t found much at all more energizing than this work of reading and writing and talking – or that’s made me feel more fully in contact with the world, and all the difficulties and delights of being a part of it. I’m legit delighted I get to do this, and to do it among such preposterously talented, devoted, venturesome-minded colleagues.

How do you prepare students for their future careers?

That’s a great question – which, again as Head of department, I get a lot. There are a couple of answers, concentric in arrangement. Most practically, training in English equips our students with a range of extraordinarily adaptive skills, coveted by employers across sectors. Facility with language, interpretive agility, a live-minded responsiveness to conditions of ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and above all an ability to *write*: these are aptitudes essential to work in tech, media, education, law, politics, medicine, and much else. But more largely, in the context of social and indeed planetary circumstances that grow every day more precarious, our work speaks up as well for the urgent necessity, not only of such practical aptitudes, but of the values they incubate (the sorts of values without which “success” can come to mean little more than acquisition, “innovation” mere destructiveness, “freedom” the latitude to exploit, and so on). Humanist inquiry of the sort we pursue in English, with its situated knowledges and its cultural attunements and its fine-grained attentiveness to the shifting complexity of ethical and moral life, gives restorative heft to these ideals. Finally, serious work in English prepares its participants, as I think virtually nothing else can, for the perplexities, battering sorrows, and errant joys of being alive in the world. The painful wonder of being a person, being human, among other persons: this is what the liberal arts – the humanities – are all about!

What do you hope your students will get out of an LAS degree?

Just what I said above: aptitudes, inspiration, a sense of the sometimes joyous and sometimes frightening complexity of the world, and a hunger to be a vibrant part of it.

How did you become interested in your creative writing?

Well, I’m a scholar – I study American literature of the nineteenth century – and so for a long time I wrote about that, and my goal in those books was the goal that I think motivates a lot of writers: say what you think, as exactingly and thoroughly as you can, but in a way that sounds like you. Gradually, I became interested in seeing what other ways I might sound, on the page. I wanted to see if I could sound like I sound not only when I’m behind the podium but when I’m, say, in a bar, fighting about records or books with my friends (since that scene of talk has always meant a lot to me). So I got interested in trying to make a writerly voice that might be as companionable, as attuned to the homely intensities of things like love and sorrow, as it was scholarly. And that led me to write about a lot other things (like bands and books but also friendship, parenthood, loss, devotion, grief, love) in a different mode.

This is a book of essays trying to work on what it can mean to love the things we love (records, books, movies, lovers, friends, children) in the shadow of so much calamity and of ruin, a time of polycrisis and collapse. It pays a lot of attention to how our devotion to weird things like songs and poems helps to fortify our attachment to one another – and, with this, our attachment to life, even in moments of great direness. As I’ve said a lot about it when I’ve given talks: it’s an often downhearted book about joy.

Why did you choose to come to UIC and LAS specifically?

I was offered the job a little over ten years ago, and it’s a blessing to me that I came. We do something so rare, so singular here: we are committed to bringing the highest caliber education imaginable – an absolutely top-tier, R1 education – to an urban, diverse, hugely dynamic, and overwhelmingly working-class student body. Lots of places (especially rich places) like to say they do that, as a kind of advertising; at UIC – and in LAS in particular – it is a lived daily reality. It makes it an invigorating place to work.

Advice for new students?

Honestly? Take English classes. Read a bunch; read some more. Then take even more English classes. I promise you will be glad you did.