Willie van Peer | |
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| Born | Joannes van Peer 1947 Sint-Lenaarts, Belgium |
| Occupation(s) | Professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany |
| Spouse | Mimi Debruyn |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Lancaster University |
| Thesis | Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding (1980) re-edited by Routledge in 2020. |
| Doctoral advisor | Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Literary theory |
| Sub-discipline | Empirical study of literature |
| Institutions | Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich |
| Notable works | Stylistics and Psychology:Investigations of Foregrounding |
| Website | https://www.daf.uni-muenchen.de/personen/emeriti/van_peer/index.html |
Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich,Germany. [1] He is a linguist,literary scholar,and one of the founders of the empirical study of literature. Van Peer has published extensively in his main areas of research:foregrounding, [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] narratology, [7] literary evaluation, [8] [9] [10] [11] literary theory, [12] emotion in literature [13] [14] and intimate relations in literature. [15] [16] Van Peer was Vice President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA,1996–1998),Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (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 to Literature (2000–2010) and founding editor of Scientific Study of Literature (2011). Directions in Empirical Literary Studies [17] was published in his honour in 2008.
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Van Peer's PhD and the book Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding (1986) was the first attempt to empirically validate the concept of foregrounding,originally developed by the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists.
Van Peer has been Visiting Scholar in the Departments of Comparative Literature at Stanford and at Princeton University,and in the Department of (Cognitive) Psychology at the University of Memphis. He is also a Fellow of Clare Hall of Cambridge University and an Honorary Professor of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University.
