Making an Effort: John Rawls, Daniel Bell, and the Origins of Equality of Opportunity

Before coming to Stanford he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Cornell University and, before that, a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Cornell. Petersen received his PhD in American Studies at Harvard University in 2020. His dissertation, "Meritocracy in America," received prizes from the Society for US Intellectual History and the Forum for the History of Human Science. An article based on this research has received a revise and resubmit response from the American Historical Review; he is currently at work on a book manuscript that builds on this research. 

In addition to my academic work, he has served as an editor at n+1 magazine, an internationally recognized journal of politics and culture based in New York, for more than fifteen years. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Review of Books. He also maintains a semi-regular newsletter, "Making History." 

He has expertise across the history of Silicon Valley, from business history and labor history to environmental history and intellectual history. His research interests generally cover the history of US political economy from the Gilded Age to the present.