Dr. Joseph Petek has been promoted to Associate Editor of the Critical Edition of Whitehead.
Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Joe graduated magna cum laude from Marquette University with a triple-major in Communication Studies, Writing-Intensive English, and Theology in 2007. After attending Chicago Divinity School from 2009–2011, where he studied under Franklin I. Gamwell, Joe began attending Claremont School of Theology in fall 2011, where he studied under Roland Faber.
Joe was hired as an Editorial Assistant for the Critical Edition in February 2013, and quickly became an indispensable asset to the project, helping to develop digitization, archive, and transcription protocols while displaying strong organizational skills and a keen eye for editing. After many invaluable contributions, Joe was invited to serve as the Edition’s Chief Archivist and Assistant Editor, a role in which he has supervised half a dozen Editorial Assistants, assisted in the editing of the first volume of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures (HL1), and was a full named editor on the second volume of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures (HL2). He is currently editing the first of two volumes of Whitehead’s Collected Papers with Robert J. Valenza and myself.
Joe defended his dissertation, Unearthing the Unknown Whitehead: An Examination of the Significance of the Critical Edition of Whitehead, in December 2021. It is expected to be published as a book in Lexington’s Contemporary Whitehead Studies series. Other publications include Whitehead at Harvard, 1924–1925 (co-edited with myself, 2020), Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism (co-edited with Roland Faber and Jeffrey A. Bell, 2017), and a forthcoming article in Process Studies 51.1, “Religion and Hatred: Examining an Unpublished Whitehead Essay.”
