Faculty biography - Peter Peregrine
Peter Peregrine has found himself studying or doing research in a foreign country for some part of nearly every year since 1991 (including a summer at UCLA, which, as a true Wisconsin cheesehead, he considers a foreign country). He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in England and Syria, done museum research in China, participated in study tours to Japan, Kenya, and Vietnam, and led study tours to China and Japan. He has included students in most of his archaeological fieldwork and study tours, and he is looking forward to working with students in Pune as the Faculty Coordinating Representative for the Fall 2011 ACM India Program.
Peregrine grew up in the Chicago area, and spent the entire decade of the 1980s at Purdue University, where he earned a B.A. in English, an M.S. in anthropology, and a Ph.D. in anthropology. He was happy to leave Purdue to join the faculty of Juniata College in 1990, but was also happy to return to the Midwest in 1995 to join the faculty of Lawrence University, where he is now Professor of Anthropology and an unrepentant Packers fan. He has two daughters and two dogs, and has been married for 26 years to his high school sweetheart, Anne.
Peregrine’s research focuses on “big questions” of human history: Why did people come to live in cities? How do coercive leaders maintain their power? What happens when people from very different cultural and linguistic backgrounds come to live together? He has pursued answers to these questions in a variety of different ways—from archaeological excavation to complex cross-cultural statistical analyses. Most recently he has been working with other scholars at the Santa Fe Institute to integrate archaeological, linguistic, and genetic information to understand how modern humans expanded across the earth in the last forty to fifty thousand years and, more specifically, how the diversity of human languages emerged in the last twenty thousand years.