Richard A. Peterson (sociologist)

Richard Peterson was born in Mussoorie, British India, where his father was a missionary. He graduated from Oberlin College with a bachelor's, and attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he worked with the sociologist Alvin Gouldner and completed his PhD in 1962^[2] In 1965, Peterson received a job in the sociology department at Vanderbilt UniversityinNashville, Tennessee.^[3] It was there that he began to study the country music scene in-depth.

He was the founding chairman of the American Sociological Association's culture section, and the section's prize for the best graduate student paper is named in honor of him. He was a major contributor to the "production of culture" perspective within the sociology of culture,^[4][5][6] and a widely known scholar of popular music, country-western in particular. Peterson's highly-cited book Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity "is one of the most important scholarly works ever written about the genre".^[7]

The journal Poetics released a special double issue devoted to the contributions of Peterson to the sociology of culture.^[8]

• Peterson, R.A. and Simkus, A. (1992) 'How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups', in M. Lamont and M. Fournier (eds) Cultivating Differences, pp 152–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Peterson, Richard A. (August 1992). "Understanding audience segmentation: From elite and mass to omnivore and univore". Poetics. 21 (4): 243–258. doi:10.1016/0304-422X(92)90008-Q.
• Peterson, Richard A.; Kern, Roger M. (October 1996). "Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore". American Sociological Review. 61 (5): 900–909. doi:10.2307/2096460.
• Peterson, Richard A. (November 1997). "Changing representation of status through taste displays: An introduction". Poetics. 25 (2–3): 71–73. doi:10.1016/S0304-422X(97)00012-0.
• Peterson, R.A. (2005) 'Problems in Comparative Research: The Example of Omnivorousness', Poetics 33(5—6): 257—82 .

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