I'm a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Before coming to the Bay Area I taught at the University of Toronto, where I finished my PhD in the study of religion.
I'm a historian of religion in premodern South Asia, and I work closely with Sanskrit, Persian, and Marathi language material. I focus on a cluster of devotional and scholastic traditions known as Vedanta, but I have wider interests in the history of Jainism, Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. My current book project uses an unstudied collection of polemics, poems, and scholarly treatises to chart a history of devotional branding and scarification (taptamudrā), a practice popular today among several Vaishnava Vedanta traditions. I'm also working on a number of collaborative projects, including a global comparative study of blasphemy and a study of interreligious love and intimacy in pre-colonial India.
You can find my articles in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, the Medieval Globe, and elsewhere. For more on my research and teaching, click on the links below.
You can reach me at: jpetersn@stanford.edu
I'm a historian of religion in premodern South Asia, and I work closely with Sanskrit, Persian, and Marathi language material. I focus on a cluster of devotional and scholastic traditions known as Vedanta, but I have wider interests in the history of Jainism, Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. My current book project uses an unstudied collection of polemics, poems, and scholarly treatises to chart a history of devotional branding and scarification (taptamudrā), a practice popular today among several Vaishnava Vedanta traditions. I'm also working on a number of collaborative projects, including a global comparative study of blasphemy and a study of interreligious love and intimacy in pre-colonial India.
You can find my articles in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, the Medieval Globe, and elsewhere. For more on my research and teaching, click on the links below.
You can reach me at: jpetersn@stanford.edu
