Joseph Peterson
I am an aspiring specialist in the cultural and intellectual history of Third Republic France. At present, I am particularly concerned with the ways religious patterns of thought persist in the secular redemption narratives of many "neo-Romantic," fin-de-siècle social thinkers. Subsidiary interests include theories of secularization, de-secularization and pluralization; the origins of fascism and Vichy; and the contexts of European Modernist literature.
In my time at Yale, under the direction of John Merriman, I am eager to find an approach that merges my penchant for traditional intellectual history with a more transnational and events-conscious perspective -- perhaps examining how the colonial experience of religious diversity affected the identity of French Catholics like Ernest Psichari, for instance.
I am a native of South Jersey, though I am just returning to the Northeast from an extended sojourn in the upstate of South Carolina, where I met my wife, Jenny, and recently completed my MA in history at Clemson University.
