Faculty
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: annap@ufl.edu
Anna Peterson is professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her main research and teaching areas are environmental and social ethics, religion and politics, and religion in Latin America.
Her first book, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (1997), examines how religion helped Salvadorans both understand and respond to political violence in the 1970s and 1980s. Her other work on Latin American religion includes Christianity, Globalization, and Social Change in the Americas (2001), co-edited with Manuel Vásquez and Philip Williams, which resulted from a multi-year, collaborative study of religion and social change in Peru, El Salvador, and U.S. Latino communities. More recently, she collaborated with Manuel Vásquez on Religions of Latin America: Histories and Documents in Context (2008), which introduces the diversity of religion across Latin America from precolonial times to the present.
Professor Peterson returned to El Salvador to research Residence on Earth: Utopian Communities in the Americas (2005), which compares the experiences of returned refugees in eastern El Salvador and those of Amish farmers in the Midwestern U.S. The book brings together her interests in the sociology of religion and ethics. She has also written about ethics in more theoretical works, including her book Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World (2001), which explores the complex connections among conceptions of human nature and attitudes toward non-human nature.
Anna Peterson's new book, Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire, was published in September 2009 by Columbia University Press. The book explores the ethics embedded in interpersonal relationships and encounters with non-human nature and their potential as a resource for progressive social change.
Professor Peterson is presently involved in a collaborative project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to develop curriculum and material for teaching environmental ethics to scientists, engineers, and technology professionals.
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. She was the founding chair of the Sierra Club's national Sustainable Consumption Committee and 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/
