Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. He is a linguist, literary scholar, and one of the founders of the

empirical study of literature The empirical study of literature is an interdisciplinary field of research which includes the psychology, sociology, and philosophy of texts, the contextual study of literature, and the history of reading literary texts. The International Soci ...

. Van Peer has published extensively in his main areas of research:

foregrounding Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance (word, clause, phrase, phoneme, etc.) stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more urban knowledge. It is " ...

narratology Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French ''narratologie'', coined by Tzvetan Todorov (''Grammaire du Décaméron'', 1969). Its theoretica ...

, literary evaluation,

literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, m ...

emotion Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavior, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is ...

in literature and intimate relations in literature. Van Peer was Vice President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA, 1996–1998), Chair of the

Poetics and Linguistics Association The Poetics and Linguistics Association is an international academic association which exists to promote the research, teaching and learning in the study of linguistic style and the language of literature. The Poetics and Linguistics Association is ...

(PALA, 2000–2003) and President of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL, 2004–2006). He was (co-)editor of the series Linguistic Approaches t
Literature
(2000–2010) and founding editor of '' Scientific Study of Literature'' (2011). ''Directions in Empirical Literary Studies'' was published in his honour in 2008. Van Peer's PhD and the book ''Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding'' (1986) was the first attempt to

empirically In philosophy, empiricism is an Epistemology, epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from Sense, sensory experience and empirical evidence. It is one of several competing views within ...

validate the concept of

, originally developed by the

Russian Formalists Russian formalism was a school of literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eikhen ...

and Prague Structuralists. Van Peer has been Visiting Scholar in the Departments of Comparative Literature at

Stanford Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth governor of and th ...

and at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, and in the Department of (Cognitive) Psychology at the

University of Memphis The University of Memphis (Memphis) is a public university, public research university in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1912, the university has an enrollment of more than 20,000 students. The university maintains the Herff Col ...

. He is also a Fellow of Clare Hall of

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

and an Honorary Professor of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University.

REDES project

The Research for the Development of Empirical Studies project (REDES, 2002–2012) was inaugurated when Willie van Peer and Frank Hakemulder (

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; , formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public university, public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2023, it had an enrollment of ...

) were invited to teach a summer course at the

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (, UFRJ) is a public university, public research university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the largest federal university in the country and is one of the Brazilian centers of excellence in teaching and r ...

, Brazil, and came into contact with an on-going project being carried out by Sonia Zyngier following the tenets of

critical pedagogy Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture. It insists that issues of social justice and de ...

. They invited Anna Chesnokova (then

Kyiv National Linguistic University Kyiv National Linguistic University () is a public university located in Kyiv, Ukraine. It was founded in 1948 as Kyiv State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. Kyiv National Linguistic University was ranked the fourth best Ukrainian un ...

) to join. The central goal of the project was to promote an environment where students could become

autonomous In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be defi ...

researchers through

intercultural Cross-cultural communication is a field of study investigating how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communi ...

cooperation over the internet and through face to face events. For a decade, the REDES international research group investigated culture, literature, language and media from a

multicultural Multiculturalism is the coexistence of multiple cultures. The word is used in sociology, in political philosophy, and colloquially. In sociology and everyday usage, it is usually a synonym for ''ethnic'' or cultural pluralism in which various e ...

perspective.

Selected works

* * * van Peer, Willie and Anna Chesnokova (2022)
''Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics''
Bloomsbury.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:van Peer, Willie Living people Academic staff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Empiricists Scholars of German literature Literary scholars 1947 births