Jonathan R. Peterson

Jonathan Peterson is assistant professor of Sanskrit and premodern South Asia. Before joining MESAAS he taught at Stanford University and at the University of Toronto, where he completed his PhD in 2021. Jonathan is a scholar of Sanskrit literature and philosophy and an intellectual historian of religion in premodern South Asia. He works closely with several areas of Sanskrit learning, including Vedanta, linguistics, epistemology, and poetics, and he has broader interests in Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. His current book project uses an unstudied archive of Sanskrit polemics to think about histories of Hindu difference on the eve of colonialism. His second book examines the poetics of Hindu-Muslim intimacy in Mughal north India. Jonathan is also contributing to several collaborative projects. These include a millennium-long intellectual history of Vedanta, an edition and translation of a neglected work of Indian epistemology, and a global comparative project on blasphemy and its histories. His articles can be found in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, the Journal of Hindu Studies, the Medieval Globe, and elsewhere.