Zoë D. Peterson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor,
Department of Psychology
Institute for Women and Gender Studies
University of Missouri-St. Louis
325 Stadler Hall
One University Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63121-4499
Phone: 314-516-7124
Email: petersonz@umsl.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Peterson is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Women and Gender Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in Psychology and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Kansas in 2005. She completed her clinical internship at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, where she participated in rotations in the PTSD treatment center and the Women’s Clinic. She then spent two years as a Clinical Research Postdoctoral Fellow at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, where she conducted sexuality-related research and provided sex therapy to individuals and couples. She joined the faculty at UMSL in 2007.
Broadly, Dr. Peterson’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of gender and human sexuality. More specifically, Dr. Peterson has three primary and interrelated research interests—(1) understanding experiences of unwanted, coerced, and nonconsensual sex from the perspectives of both victims and perpetrators; (2) investigating the role of cognitive and emotional ambivalence in individuals’ sexual experiences; and (3) exploring the socially constructed labels that individuals apply to their consensual and non-consensual sexual experiences (e.g., What counts as “sex?” What counts as “rape?”). Dr. Peterson’s research also considers the potentially important influence of gender (or our cultural expectations about gender) within each of these topic areas.
The publication based on her dissertation (Peterson, Z. D., & Muehlenhard, C. L. (2007). Conceptualizing the wantedness of women's consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences, Journal of Sex Research, 44, 72-88, won the award for the best article published in the Journal of Sex Research during the previous year.
Dr. Peterson is a member of the UM-St. Louis Safe Zone community. 