John Durham Peters
Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1986
M.A., University of Utah, 1982
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 Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel. His new book, The Meaning of Weather: A Media History is forthcoming in May 2027 from the University of Chicago Press, like his other books. He has advised or co-advised over four dozen doctoral dissertations.
updated October 2026
