Richard Austin Peterson (September 28, 1932 â February 4, 2010) was an American sociologist and emeritus Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University.
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 UrbanaâÂÂChampaign, where he worked with the sociologist Alvin Gouldner and completed his PhD in 1962 In 1965, Peterson received a job in the sociology department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. 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, 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".
The journal Poetics released a special double issue devoted to the contributions of Peterson to the sociology of culture.
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