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 scholar of Sanskrit literature and a historian of religion in premodern South Asia. In addition to Sanskrit, I work closely with Persian and Marathi language material. My work focusses on a cluster of scholastic and devotional traditions known as Vedanta, but I have wider interests in Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. My current book project uses an unstudied archive of polemics, poems, and scholarly treatises about devotional branding (taptamudrā)––a practice central to several Vedanta movements––to think about histories of embodiment and religious difference on the eve of colonialism. 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 scholar of Sanskrit literature and a historian of religion in premodern South Asia. In addition to Sanskrit, I work closely with Persian and Marathi language material. My work focusses on a cluster of scholastic and devotional traditions known as Vedanta, but I have wider interests in Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. My current book project uses an unstudied archive of polemics, poems, and scholarly treatises about devotional branding (taptamudrā)––a practice central to several Vedanta movements––to think about histories of embodiment and religious difference on the eve of colonialism. 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