Gerald Peters

Gerald Peters earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He taught at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and the University of Saskatchewan, Canada before coming to the University of Southern Maine in 1987 where he is Professor of English.  He has served as Chair of the Department of English and Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. His research interests include various “discourses of self determination” ranging from diaries and travel journals to confessions, autobiographies, and the Bildungsroman. He teaches courses in ancient literature, autobiography, critical theory, modern fiction, and the Bildungsroman. His published works include Diary of Anna Baerg, 1917-1924 (1985), The Mutilating God: Authorship and Authority in the Narrative of Conversion (1993), Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994), Rereading Goethe, Rethinking Culture (2014), and Nineteenth-Century Utopianism and the American Social Imaginary (2021).