I'm currently 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 and culture in South Asia, with a focus on early modern and colonial India. My research clusters around issues of inter-religious exchange, sectarianism and community-formation, caste and gender, and the social life of textual knowledge. I work closely with Sanskrit, Persian, and Marathi language material. My current book project, Branding the Hindu Corpus, uses a rich and unstudied collection of polemical writings about bodily branding and scarification (taptamudrā) to tell a story about Hindu difference on the eve of colonialism. I'm also involved in several collaborations, including an ambitious intellectual history of Vedanta, a global comparative project on blasphemy, and a longue durée study of the notion of ‘difference’ (bheda) in Sanskrit philosophy.
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 and culture in South Asia, with a focus on early modern and colonial India. My research clusters around issues of inter-religious exchange, sectarianism and community-formation, caste and gender, and the social life of textual knowledge. I work closely with Sanskrit, Persian, and Marathi language material. My current book project, Branding the Hindu Corpus, uses a rich and unstudied collection of polemical writings about bodily branding and scarification (taptamudrā) to tell a story about Hindu difference on the eve of colonialism. I'm also involved in several collaborations, including an ambitious intellectual history of Vedanta, a global comparative project on blasphemy, and a longue durée study of the notion of ‘difference’ (bheda) in Sanskrit philosophy.
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
