Richard Austin Peterson (September 28, 1932 – February 4, 2010) was an American sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University.

Richard Peterson was born in Mussoorie, British India, where his father was a missionary.

He graduated from Oberlin College with a bachelor's, and attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he worked with the sociologist Alvin Gouldner and completed his PhD in 1962[2] In 1965, Peterson received a job in the sociology department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Peterson's highly cited book Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity "is one of the most important scholarly works ever written about the genre".

[7] The journal Poetics released a special double issue devoted to the contributions of Peterson to the sociology of culture.