Tom Peterson
Key information
- Qualifications
- BA (Sussex), MMus (SOAS)
- Email address
- 656021@soas.ac.uk
- Thesis title
- Archives of Sri Lanka's Vocal Arts: The Lyrical Genres of the Nevill Collection as Refractions of Sri Lanka, Past and Present
- Internal Supervisors
- Dr Richard Williams
Biography
Tom Peterson is a current CHASE doctoral researcher at SOAS. He gained a BA Honours in Professional Musicianship at Sussex University in 2013 and an MMus in Ethnomusicology at SOAS in 2019. He is an experienced musician, having worked as a performer, producer, and composer in a variety of Western, African, and Latin American settings. He is a student of the north-Indian Sārangi, having studied with ustād Surjeet Singh, and is turning his attention to the Saraswati Veena as a student of shrīmati Gayathri Govindarajan. He also has an article forthcoming with Asian Music titled ‘Sonic Benefit: Buddhist Ontologies of Chant and the Supramundane in Bengaluru’ that makes significant contributions to the under-researched field of Theravāda sound by presenting a sonic ontology of Buddhist metaphysics along with specific examples of its application, practice, and context.
Research interests
- Ethnomusicology
- History
- South Asia
- Sinhala
- Colonialism