Willie Van Peer

Willie Van Peer

Willie van Peer is emeritus Professor of Literature and Intercultural Hermeneutics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. He is also a Fellow for Life of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.

He is the author of just under 200 research articles on literature and its effects, the epistemology of literary theory, empirical studies of literature, and literary history, and has (co-)published several books.

He acted as Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (2000–2003), and was president of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL, 2004–2006); in this capacity he was the organizer of the society’s large biennial conference in Munich. His most recent book (in Dutch) is What Did Jesus Look Like? (De Standaard, 2020.)

He co-edited the book series Linguistic Approaches to Literature for Benjamins from 2000 through 2010, and was the founding General Editor of the journalScientific Study of Literature (John Benjamins) in 2011. He has been a Visiting Scholar in the Departments of Comparative Literature at Stanford and at Princeton University, and of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Memphis.

Follow this author:

Books by this author