About
Peter Lewis Allen is a writer and executive coach who lives in New York City. He is represented by Georges Borchardt, Inc.
Education
Allen received his bachelor’s degree with honors in English and Classics from Haverford College, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He holds a master’s and a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago and a Diplôme d’études approfondies from the University of Poitiers, France. In addition, Allen has an M.B.A. in strategic management and health care management from the Wharton School and an executive coaching certification from the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His creative writing background includes screenwriting courses with Lew Hunter (UCLA Extension) and Robert Towne and courses in autobiographical writing with author Douglas Sadownick and MacArthur Fellow Luis Alfaro at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA, and with journalist Donna Minkowitz through the 92nd Street “Y” in New York.
Academia
Allen has been a full-time member of the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Southern California, and Pomona College, where he was a tenured associate professor of French and comparative literature and a member of Pomona’s media studies program. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member of the faculties of Claremont Graduate School, Nanyang Business School, Yale-National University of Singapore College, and Hult International Business School, where he was voted executive M.B.A. professor of the year. During Allen’s academic career, he was awarded numerous honors, including a University of Chicago Special Humanities fellowship; a Rotary Foundation graduate fellowship; grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Princeton University, and Pomona College; a Whiting dissertation fellowship; an Andrew W. Mellon postgraduate fellowship; the Scholar in Residence position at the Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; and a scholar in residence fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.
Publications
Allen’s literary publications include articles in numerous journals, including The New York Times, The Chaucer Review, the Medieval Feminist Newsletter, Exemplaria, Papers on Language and Literature, and Body Positive. He has contributed articles to Medieval France: An Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of AIDS, and has reviewed books for Modern Philology, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Modern Language Notes. His scholarly books include The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the “Romance of the Rose” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) and The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (University of Chicago, 2000). The Wages of Sin was reviewed in a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Weekly, The Voice Literary Supplement, Nature, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Excerpts appeared on FindLaw.com and ThomasPaine.com. Media interviews included “Radio Times” (WHYY: Philadelphia NPR affiliate), “SexTV” (CityTV, Toronto), and “Truth, Politics, and Power” (NPR). Allen was featured in the 2019 HBO documentary Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.
Allen’s business writings have been published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, the McKinsey Quarterly, the Harvard Management Communications Letter, and elsewhere. His business cases have been published by Singapore Management University and Ivey Business School (Ivey Best Seller Award). With Agoda.com co-founder and chairman Robert Rosenstein, Allen co-authored self-published books on the short-term rental industry and business management. While leading public affairs at Agoda.com, Allen was interviewed in many Asian business publications and contributed to publications by the American Chambers of Commerce in Taiwan and Singapore. He also edited newsletters at Agoda and at McKinsey & Company.
Allen has spoken at many conferences and college and university campuses, including Yale-National University of Singapore College, Wharton, Harvard Business School, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Singapore Management University, the University of Florida, Cornell, CUNY, the University of Oregon, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands), University of Southern California, and the University of California at Berkeley, SUNY.
Employment
Allen has worked at McKinsey & Company (as a consultant, a knowledge manager, and a strategy practice expert); at Google, Inc. (as founder and director of Google University); at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore (talent management); at Agoda.com, the Asia-based subsidiary of the Booking Holdings online travel group (VP of people and organization development; VP of public affairs); at APL Group, a private equity firm (chief people officer); and at Aegis Ventures (head of learning and leadership development). He is currently managing director of a coaching and consulting firm, Allen Strategies LLC.
Featured Work
The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present
Near the end of the century, a new and terrifying disease arrives suddenly from a distant continent. Infecting people through sex, it storms from country to country, defying all drugs and medical knowledge. The deadly disease provokes widespread fear and recrimination; medical authorities call the epidemic "the just rewards of unbridled lust"; a religious leader warns that "God has raised up new diseases against debauchery." The time was the 1490s; the place, Europe; the disease, syphilis; and the religious leader was none other than John Calvin.
Throughout history, Western society has often viewed sickness as a punishment for sin. It has failed to prevent and cure diseases—especially diseases tied to sex—that were seen as the retribution of a wrathful God. The Wages of Sin, the remarkable history of these diseases, shows how society's views of particular afflictions often heightened the suffering of the sick and substituted condemnation for care. Peter Allen moves from the medieval diseases of lovesickness and leprosy through syphilis and bubonic plague, described by one writer as "a broom in the hands of the Almighty, with which He sweepeth the most nasty and uncomely corners of the universe." More recently, medical and social responses to masturbation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and AIDS in the twentieth round out Allen's timely and erudite study of the intersection of private morality and public health. The Wages of Sin tells the fascinating story of how ancient views on sex and sin have shaped, and continue to shape, religious life, medical practice, and private habits.
