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Anthony Petro
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Biographical Text
Anthony Petro (Ph.D., Religion, Princeton University) is an assistant professor at Boston University, in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. His teaching and research interests include religion and culture in the United States; religion, medicine, and public health; and gender and sexuality studies. His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford, 2015), investigates the history of U.S. American religious responses to the AIDS crisis and their role in the promotion of a national moral discourse on sex. He has published essays on a number of topics, including histories of Catholic sexual abuse, critical disability studies and religion, and approaches to studying race, gender, and sexuality in North American religion.
Petro is currently developing two projects that engage questions about religion and secularism, the cultural politics of morality, and religious formations of bodies in the modern U.S. The first examines the history of American Christian engagements with health and disability policy in the U.S. since the 1950s. It demonstrates how Christian leaders and activists have shaped cultural understandings of health and moral citizenship through debates about topics such as alcoholism, end of life care, disability rights, vaccination, abortion, and the war on drugs. His second project, “The Queer Arts of American Religion,” examines how a range of feminist and queer artists have engaged religious themes and rituals in their work since the 1960s. It explores how this archive of visual and performance art helps us to rethink key categories in the study of religion and in gender and sexuality studies.
Before coming to BU, Petro served as an assistant professor / faculty fellow in NYU’s Program in Religious Studies. For the last five years, he has co-chaired an interdisciplinary seminar called “Global Perspectives on Religion and HIV/AIDS” for the American Academy of Religion.
https://www.bu.edu/religion/people/faculty/bios/anthony-petro
Petro is currently developing two projects that engage questions about religion and secularism, the cultural politics of morality, and religious formations of bodies in the modern U.S. The first examines the history of American Christian engagements with health and disability policy in the U.S. since the 1950s. It demonstrates how Christian leaders and activists have shaped cultural understandings of health and moral citizenship through debates about topics such as alcoholism, end of life care, disability rights, vaccination, abortion, and the war on drugs. His second project, “The Queer Arts of American Religion,” examines how a range of feminist and queer artists have engaged religious themes and rituals in their work since the 1960s. It explores how this archive of visual and performance art helps us to rethink key categories in the study of religion and in gender and sexuality studies.
Before coming to BU, Petro served as an assistant professor / faculty fellow in NYU’s Program in Religious Studies. For the last five years, he has co-chaired an interdisciplinary seminar called “Global Perspectives on Religion and HIV/AIDS” for the American Academy of Religion.
https://www.bu.edu/religion/people/faculty/bios/anthony-petro