John Durham Peters

John Durham Peters wins NEH fellowship

"I am neither a commie, nor an elitist." That's how John Durham Peters, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa, wryly described his "magic formula" for winning a coveted fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In fact, Peters wrote the proposal a year ago, sent it in without previous contact, and then forgot about it. "I apply for quite a few grants," he said. "I didn't really expect to get this one."

But Peters got this one, a $30,000 fellowship to complete a book-length study of the intellectual history of the idea of communication. The University of Iowa will release Peters from his duties and supplement the fellowship so that his normal salary will be realized and so that he will have exclusive time to spend on the project.

Peters contends that his career to this point has prepared him for undertaking such a project. Since receiving his doctoral degree from Stanford in 1986, Peters has published on a variety of philosophers and their views of communication in journals such as Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Media, Culture and Society, and Sociological Theory. These works will become the basis for the book, which as three parts: (1) Figuring Public and Private in Communication: Antiquity and Enlightenment, (2) Philosophy and Politics of Communication in the Nineteenth Century, and (3) Twentieth-Century Dreams and Anxieties. Peters also argued that he was "linguistically prepared" to undertake the project, having a reading knowledge of German, French, Dutch, Spanish, and enough ancient Greek and Latin to "grasp nuances in conceptual vocabulary."

Asked why he felt that NEH was willing to fund his proposal, Peters speculated that NEH Chair Sheldon Hackney's announced emphasis on national conversation (and the Endowment's subsequent difficulties in defining "conversation") may have wielded some influence with the reviewers. Peters's proposal was also grounded solidly in philosophy and history, two core humanities disciplines, but he took in it an unabashed stance on behalf of the communication discipline. For example, he wrote, "Admittedly, communication seems a somewhat prosaic concept at first glance compared with other concepts current in the humanities. But it is, I argue, centrally woven into the conversation of modern political and social thought. Many recent debates in the humanities--about the nature of discourse, emerging democracies, postcolonial identity, or the role of ritual and rhetoric in the shaping of social life, for instance--all turn out to be, in many ways about conundrums of communication. Indeed, in academic and public life more broadly, the term is constantly invoked but little studied. This is troubling in an age in which so many public and private dilemmas turn on questions of "communication." . . . The book I will complete will present a rich philosophical and historical grounding for public and academic debates about communication in years to come."

Though he made light of his submission, in preparing the fellowship application, Peters did more than just toss off some standard language and hope for the best. He read and modeled his work after successful applications, and he solicited review and recommendation letters from scholars in philosophy, history, and communication, including some previous NEH fellows. Peters also felt that his emphasis on anxieties was important for the NEH reviewers, because not only did this emphasis make his project a contemporary one but because, as Peters put it, "Communication can't be thought of except for the possibility of breakdown."

With the NEH in danger of elimination by Congress, Peters may turn out to be one of the last NEH fellows. But, the National Endowment has always been proud of its support of groundbreaking projects that have not only produced significant scholarship but that have opened topics of scholarly interest to public attention. Peters's project may turn out not only to signal an increasing interest in communication study by humanities scholars but may also "make the leap" from scholarly to public interest as well.