Dissecting H. Peter Steeves

Welcome back to the Black Hare Press Dissecting Author interviews, where we dissect an author to find out who they are, what they write, and what keeps their creative juices flowing.
 
Today, we put down the scalpel and instead celebrate the life and accomplishments of esteemed author and academic, Howard Peter Steeves, and reveal his new release, Mandatory Counseling.

H. Peter Steeves: A Life of Thought, Art, and Astonishing Range

There are writers whose work arrives out of one discipline, one lane, one tidy professional identity. H. Peter Steeves is not one of them. He is a philosopher, teacher, artist, performer, thinker, and writer whose career has moved across ethics, aesthetics, science, politics, and art with uncommon energy and seriousness. Even the bare list of what he has done feels improbable: Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Emeritus Director of the Humanities Center at DePaul University; author of multiple books; lecturer and scholar; installation artist; playwright in residence; cartoonist; lecture-performer; and participant in astrobiology work connected with NASA Ames.
 
That range is not accidental. It seems to grow out of a mind unwilling to stay in one box for very long. Steeves earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University in 1995 and built a career around phenomenology, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. Over the years, his work has also extended into cosmology and astrobiology, especially the origin events of the universe and of life itself. Public profiles and bibliographic records consistently show the same pattern: a scholar drawn not to narrow specialization for its own sake, but to the biggest questions available. 

And yet, for all that intellectual reach, what stands out most in the material about him is not merely prestige, but vitality. His supplied biography does not present the picture of a cloistered academic sealed off from the world. It presents someone who moved deliberately between worlds: scholarship and art, theory and public performance, the classroom and the wider culture. He has been a Visiting Installation Artist at Chicago Sculpture Works, a Playwright in Residence at the DePaul Humanities Center, and a staff cartoonist for the Oak Leaves newspaper; his artistic work has appeared across the United States and abroad, including in South Korea, Germany, and Latin America.

That breadth matters because it helps explain why his work has always felt larger than the confines of academic prose. His “lecture-performances,” as he calls them, blend scholarship with live music, dance, theater, magic, spectacle, and audience participation. That phrase alone tells you something essential about him: he has never treated ideas as inert objects. He treats them as living things—things to test, stage, challenge, and share. According to his biography, these lecture-performances have been commissioned by museums, cities, colleges, and universities around the world. 
 
The honors attached to his name are substantial. His biography notes that he has been a Presidential Scholar and recipient of the United States Presidential Medallion, a Princeton Historical Center Fellow, a Senior Fulbright Fellow in Venezuela, a winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities Enduring Questions award, and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies. Public-facing profiles likewise confirm his Fulbright fellowship, NEH support, fellowships at Princeton and Stanford, and his longstanding academic standing at DePaul. 

Students clearly felt the force of that presence as well. Before retiring, Steeves was named by Rate My Professors as one of the “Top 15 Best Professors in the United States,” drawn from a database of more than 1.5 million professors and teachers. That sort of recognition can be easy to dismiss as a curiosity until you stop and think about what it actually means: not merely expertise, but impact. Not merely knowledge, but memorable human connection in the classroom. 
 
His bibliography alone shows the evolution of a restless and searching intelligence. Among the works listed in his supplied bio are Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry(1998), Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life(1999), The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday (2006), Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding: Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Life of Art (2017), Being and Showtime(2020), and Up from under the Rulers: The Anarchic Phenomenological Communitarian Manifesto(2024). Public bibliographic records support this trajectory and add further evidence of the range and continuity of his work. 


If one thread seems to run through all of it, it is his refusal to accept inherited systems without pressing on them. Whether the subject is community, animal life, everyday experience, art, cosmology, or politics, Steeves’s work circles the same live wires: authority, value, relation, responsibility, embodiment, the structures that shape our lives, and the possibility that those structures may be neither natural nor just. Even in a brief public quote reflecting on what drove him toward philosophy, he speaks in terms of “the big questions of existence”—what this is all about, how it works, how we should live, and what it means. 
 
That makes Mandatory Counseling feel not like a departure from a life’s work, but another expression of it—this time through fiction rather than scholarship. And here the manuscript itself matters. This is not a generic dark tale with academic credentials attached. It is a sharp, funny, unsettling, and often brilliantly controlled story told through the reports of Mahazael, a demon under scrutiny after he begins to question “The System” he serves. What begins with a grotesquely comic situation—a demon team assigned to terrorize a child, followed by a regrouping session at Olive Garden—opens into a satire of bureaucracy, institutional cruelty, racism, ideology, complicity, and moral awakening. The story is full of wit, but it is never merely whimsical; it is doing real work beneath the laughter. 
 
That tonal balancing act is one of the story’s great achievements. Mandatory Counseling is absurd, but not disposable. It is comic, but not slight. It understands that the ridiculous and the horrifying are often much closer together than polite literature likes to admit. The manuscript moves from demonic HR and reimbursement forms to race, politics, institutional violence, and dread, and it does so with a confidence that feels wholly its own. Mahazael’s voice is especially memorable: earnest, self-justifying, unexpectedly tender in places, and increasingly unable to avoid the moral collapse of the world around him.  

There is also something especially moving in the fact that a writer who has spent so much of his life thinking about systems, ethics, and ways of being in the world has written a story so alive to contradiction. Mahazael is not a heroic simplification. He is compromised, blind in places, funny in ways he does not intend, and yet still capable of recognition. That capacity for recognition—for seeing that something is wrong even when one is implicated in it—feels deeply earned in the story. The satire lands because it is not weightless. It comes from a writer who understands the seductions of ideology and the cost of confronting it. 

It is also worth noting how much lived artistry seems to sit behind the prose. The manuscript shows a theatrical instinct, a performer’s ear, and a scholar’s appetite for ideas, all at once. That fusion makes sense when set beside the life described in his bio: the philosopher who became a lecture-performer, the academic who also made art installations, the teacher who could electrify students, the thinker who moved into science without leaving the humanities behind. The story’s comic timing, conceptual agility, and tonal boldness do not feel accidental. They feel like the work of someone who has spent a lifetime building a mind capacious enough to hold argument, performance, tenderness, rage, and play together. 
 
His biography ends with a line so perfectly odd and human that it feels almost novelistic: he lives in the south suburbs of Chicago in a communal, multigenerational home with his wife, where they try to live by anarchic-communitarian ideals. The nearest Olive Garden, the bio adds, is three towns away. It is hard to think of a better closing image for a life like this one: intellectually serious, slyly funny, resistant to convention, and still attentive to the everyday detail that turns a résumé back into a person.
 
H. Peter Steeves has clearly achieved more in one life than most people could hope to do in several. He has taught, written, questioned, made art, crossed disciplines, and left marks in rooms ranging from classrooms to galleries to scholarly communities. He has pursued thought without letting it calcify, and art without letting it float free of ideas. Whatever field he entered, he seems to have entered it fully.
 
That is what makes Mandatory Counseling feel so welcome, and so meaningful, as a new release. It arrives not as a curiosity from the margins of a distinguished career, but as further evidence of the scale of that career: one more work from a man who has spent his life refusing to think small, refusing to stay still, and refusing to let the world go uninterrogated. It stands as part of a body of work shaped by intelligence, audacity, humor, and a real hunger for what matters.
 
And that, finally, may be the best way to speak of him: not simply as an accomplished man, though he plainly is one; not simply as an honored scholar, though he is that too; but as a rare kind of maker, one whose life in thought and art has touched many people and moved through many forms without ever losing its force.

Dean Shawker
Editor-in-Chief
Black Hare Press
April 2026

MANDATORY COUNSELING by H. PETER STEEVES
Launch Date: 2nd May 2026

When a demon in mandatory therapy starts questioning Hell’s management system, the apocalypse begins to look like a bureaucratic audit gone wrong.

Mahazael, an ancient demon on forced leave after a “philosophical incident,” is ordered to attend mandatory counselling before he can return to tormenting humanity. His therapist insists on written self-reflection—an assignment that quickly spirals into confessions, grievances, and increasingly heretical doubts about Hell’s hierarchy.

Through sardonic reports that blur bureaucracy, theology, and existential dread, Mahazael recounts his missions with fellow demons—each one a grotesque parody of modern corporate culture. But as his team’s botched operations pile up, his introspection begins to reveal cracks in the infernal system itself. Are they really spreading evil, or just enforcing someone else’s lies?

Darkly hilarious and disturbingly thoughtful, Mandatory Counseling skewers everything from workplace ethics to divine justice, blending horror, satire, and philosophy in equal measure. Fans of Good Omens, Lucifer, and The Office filtered through Dante’s Inferno will find themselves laughing, wincing, and questioning their own moral compass.

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