Willie van Peer

Willie van Peer (born Joannes van Peer, August 3, 1947, Sint-Lenaarts, Belgium) is a philologist, linguist and literary scholar.. He is emeritus professor of Literature and Intercultural Hermeneutics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. Van Peer is one of the founders of a field known as 'Empirical study of literature|the empirical study of literature". His doctoral work (van Peer 1986) initiated an empirical investigation into how literature affects its readers. The field has its own association (IGEL), of which he served as president (2004–2006), organizing the 2006 conference at Chiemsee in Germany .
Van Peer's empirical work on foregrounding in literature in the 1980s challenged the reliance on exclusively hermeneutic methods by literary scholars at the time and contributed to the promotion of the empirical study of literature. He was among the key scholars laying out foundations and methods of empirical approach to the study of literary texts, countering some of those assumptions and proposing instead that literature should be studied from an evidence-based perspective .
== Education and early career ==
Van Peer received his Bachelor in Germanic Philology at the University of Antwerp and his Master at the University of Leuven. After teaching English and German to Arab and Berber children in Algeria (1971–1973), he taught in secondary schools and at a teacher training college in Flanders. In 1977, van Peer was awarded a British Council stipend for research in the Linguistics Department at Lancaster University where he worked under Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short|Mick Short. Van Peer's PhD (1980) was the first attempt to empirically validate the concept of foregrounding, originally developed by the Russian formalism|Russian Formalists and Prague linguistic circle|Prague Structuralists. Foregrounding derived from the work of Viktor Shklovsky, who showed how certain forms of words attract attention, and invite readers to see a situation vividly, as if for the first time. Van Peer’s book, Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding (1986), proposed a systematic, evidence-based and intersubjective approach to the analysis of key literary phenomena. Van Peer took up a position in Text Linguistics at the then experimental Faculty of Arts at Tilburg University in 1981. In 1987, he moved to Utrecht University where he became Associate Professor of Literary Theory, until 1997 when he was appointed to the Chair in Munich, Germany.
== Later research and academic activities ==
Apart from authoring works on foregrounding , he studied narratology , literary evaluation and love / emotion in literature / society .
The growing interest in empirical study of literature created a need for a handbook on empirical research methods allowing for an interdisciplinary dialogue between literary studies and social sciences. It resulted in the 2012 handbook, written together with Sonia Zyngier (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Frank Hakemulder (Utrecht University and University of Stavanger).
van Peer was Vice President of the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA, 1996–1998), Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA, 2000–2003) and (co-)editor of the series Linguistic Approaches to Literature, published by John Benjamins (2000–2010). He is also a Fellow for life at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. In 2011, van Peer founded the new international journal Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL) and acted as its first General Editor. The journal publishes research that applies scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literature.
He has also published on an altogether different subject: the historical reality in which the New Testament emerged.
=== REDES project ===
The Research and Development in Empirical Studies project (REDES, 2002–2012) was inaugurated when Willie van Peer and Frank Hakemulder were invited to teach a summer course at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and came into contact with an on-going project being carried out by Sonia Zyngier following the tenets of critical pedagogy. They invited Anna Chesnokova[ (then Kyiv National Linguistic University) to join. The central goal of the project was to promote an environment where students could become autonomous researchers through intercultural 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 perspective 
== Private life ==
In 1970, van Peer married Mimi Debruyn, an art and architecture historian. After the end of his academic career, together they founded Mali-ka-di, a foundation for small-scale rural development, especially for girls’ education, in three remote villages in the savannah in Mali, West-Africa.
== Major publications == 
Willie van Peer (1986), Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding. London: Croom Helm.
Willie van Peer (ed) (1988), The Taming of the Text. Explorations in Language, Literature and Culture. London: Routledge (2nd edition 1991).
Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman (eds) (2001), New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Willie van Peer and Max Louwerse (eds) (2002), Thematics. Interdisciplinary Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Willie van Peer (ed) (2008), The Quality of Literature. Linguistic Studies in the Evaluation of Literary Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jan Auracher and Willie van Peer (eds) (2008), New Beginnings in the Study of Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Willie van Peer, Frank Hakemulder and Sonia Zyngier (2012), Scientific Methods for the Humanities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Willie van Peer and Anna Chesnokova (forthcoming in 2022), Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
 
Category:1947 births
Category:Linguists from Belgium
Category:Belgian people
Category:Belgian philologists
Category:University of Antwerp alumni