Touching This Leviathan. Oregon State University Press, 2021.
“Gently So.” Notre Dame Magazine, winter 2022-23, p. 25.
“Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale.” Longreads, 22 Feb 2022.
Associate Professor of English
English and Cultural Studies
Book;
Article;
For Touching This Leviathan:
Touching This Leviathan asks how we might come to know the unknowable—in this case, whales, animals so large yet so elusive, revealing just a sliver of back, a glimpse of a fluke, or a split-second breach before diving away.
Whale books often sit within disciplinary silos. Touching This Leviathan starts a conversation among them. Drawing on biology, theology, natural history, literature, and writing studies, Peter Wayne Moe offers a deep dive into the alluring and impalpable mysteries of Earth’s largest mammal.
Entertaining, thought-provoking, and swimming with intelligence and wit, Touching is Leviathan is creative nonfiction that gestures toward science and literary criticism as it invites readers into the belly of the whale.
And for “Gently So”:
A meditation on death, life, and a bucket of good earth. Published at Notre Dame Magazine.
For “Bones Bones”
This essay recounts building SPU’s Longbranch Whale, now hanging in Eaton Hall.