Jonathan Peterson

Jonathan is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on Sanskrit literature and religion in South Asia. He completed his PhD in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Jonathan's work focusses on a cluster of scholastic and devotional traditions known as Vedanta, and he has wider interests in Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. His 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. He's also working on a number of collaborative projects, including a global comparative study of blasphemy and an ambitious intellectual history of Vedānta, both funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. You can find his articles in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, the Medieval Globe, and elsewhere.”