Anna L.Peterson
Professor
Ph.D. University of Chicago
Christianity in Latin America, Social Ethics, Environmental Ethics

Office: 105 Anderson Hall
Phone: (352) 392-1625
Email: alp@religion.ufl.edu

Anna Peterson teaches and conducts research in two main areas, falling within the department's specialties in Religion in the Americas and Religion and Nature. Within the Americas, her focus is on the interactions between religion and politics in Latin America. Her first book, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion (SUNY, 1997) examined the role of progressive Catholicism in political violence and resistance in El Salvador. With Manuel Vásquez and Philip Williams, she co-edited Christianity, Globalization, and Social Change in the Americas (Rutgers University Press, 2001), a comparative study of Latino and Latin American congregations based on collaborative research in El Salvador, Peru, and the U.S.

Her second major interest is social and environmental ethics. She has published a number of articles in those fields, as well as Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World (University of California Press, 2001). Her new book, Seeds of the Kingdom: Utopian Communities in the Americas (Oxford, 2005), explores the ways that religious ethics are embodied, articulated, and transformed in agrarian communities in Latin America and the United States. Current research interests include the cultural foundations of community-based sustainability and the environmental ethics of everyday life, especially consumption.

Peterson is an affiliate of both the Center for Latin American Studies and the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. She has been a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor (2001-2003) and a co-principal investigator for major grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Peterson was founding chair of the Sierra Club's national Sustainable Consumption Committee had has been member of the club's Sustainable Planet Strategy Team. She is currently a state senator for the United Faculty of Florida (NEA/AFT).

Peterson homepage (a work in progress):
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/alp/ALP%20homepage/