Peerawat Chiaranunt

Biography

Peerawat is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. His scholarship to date has focused on Dante Alighieri’s writings within the context of medieval intellectual culture. Tentatively entitled Dante’s Divine Physics, Peerawat’s first monograph seeks to reappraise the influence that Aristotelian natural philosophy had on the divine poet throughout his career. At the heart of the project is the recognition that Dante’s laical status, his vernacularity, and his political theology were among the factors that allowed him to instil the ‘science of mobile bodies’ with an urgency and eudaemonic relevance seldom stressed by other medieval thinkers.

Prior to joining Notre Dame as a research fellow, Peerawat completed his doctorate at Oxford in 2025 and previously studied at Notre Dame, Yale, and St. John’s College (Santa Fe, NM). Beyond Dante, he cultivates an interest in the history of ideas, medieval philosophy, and literary representations of nature and the natural world in Italy and Europe at large.