Dr Peter Riley

Dr Peter Riley is an academic, writer, and broadcaster specialising in long nineteenth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, labor history and German American culture. He also writes non-fiction and is interested in the relationship between creative and critical prose.

His most recent book Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (Profile, 2022) won the Ideas Prize for Non-Fiction. It explores one of Britain’s most bizarre subcultures: each time a whale washes up on our shores, a fugitive community of human scavengers descends to claim its trophies. Some are driven by magical beliefs; some are motivated by profit. For others, the need is much stranger. Mixing natural history, memoir, conspiracy theory, politics, and gore, Strandings was described by Iain Sinclair as “a brave, reckless and engaging performance”, by Philip Hoare as "wild and wonderful", and by Jean Sprackland as a “glorious rollercoaster of a book, whose twists and turns take us again and again to the dissolving edges between reality and mirage.” The book was recently featured as the cover story of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine, and adapted for BBC Radio 4.

He recently edited Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for the Oxford World’s Classics series, and is currently working on two further books: a popular history of fossil hunting, forthcoming with Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and a project provisionally entitled Another Language/Another America: The German-American Renaissance 1848-1871, for which he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

His first academic monograph, Against Vocation: Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. It explores how the poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Hart Crane the advertising copywriter complicates an assumed divide between the work of poetry and other “lesser” or contingent forms of labour. Ousting poetic production from any sanctuary of exemption and repose, the book recasts poetic work as a living, sensuous, often messy activity that transgresses labour’s emerging divisions and hierarchies.

Biography:

Peter (re-) joined Exeter after spending two years as Associate Professor in Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. Before that, between 2014-2020, he was Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Exeter. Before that he was an Early Career Fellow in American Literature at Oxford. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 2012.