Department of Music,
School of Arts
& College of Humanities
Dr Tom Peterson
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Key information
Key information
- Roles
- Department of Music Honorary Post-Doctoral Research Associate
- Department
- Department of Music, School of Arts & College of Humanities
- Email address
- tp4@soas.ac.uk
Biography
Tom Peterson researches music, sound, and history in South Asia, with particular interests in Sri Lanka, sacred sound, and colonial archives.
With a background in ethnomusicology, sound studies, and cultural history, his research to date considers sound arts and their sociocultural, religious, political, and historical significance in Sri Lanka and India. Combining archival research with fieldwork, his PhD thesis examined a colonial archive of Sri Lankan manuscripts through an ethnomusicological lens, bringing its contents, formation, and internal logic into conversation with wider histories of sound and music in Sri Lanka, as well as colonial listening practices, collecting, and knowledge formation. He has also published on Theravada sonic ontologies and metaphysics. He holds an MMus in Ethnomusicology and a PhD in Music, both from SOAS, University of London.
He is also Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC Synergy Grant, MANTRAMS, University of Tübingen. His work with MANTRAMS explores the metaphysic and social dynamics of sharing sacred soundspace at the multi-religious Kataragama temple complex, an important Sri Lankan pilgrimage site.
Key publications
(In-press) “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Colonial Archive: The Hugh Nevill Collection and its Resonance in Contemporary Sri Lanka”, Ethnomusicology, 71:1.
(2022) “Sonic Benefit: Buddhist Ontologies of Chant and the Supramundane in Bengaluru", Asian Music, 53:1, pp.56–79.
