Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis and Chair of the Department of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her research - which focuses on processes of marginalization and questions of agency, on the underilluminated impact of globalisation on rural areas, and on the changing relationship between centres and peripheries - is housed in the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA - http://asca.uva.nl). 

From 2018 to 2024, Esther led the ERC-funded project "Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World" (RURAL IMAGINATIONS). With a team of PhD and postdoc researchers, she examined the crucial role played by cultural imaginations of the rural in literature, film and television in determining what aspects of contemporary rural life do and do not become visible, and how this affects the political mobilization of the rural. The countries compared were the UK, the US, the Netherlands, China and South Africa.

Other research interests are popular culture, spectrality/invisibility, modern literary and cultural theory (in particular the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, poststructuralism, cultural analysis and gender studies), and 20th- and 21st-century British and American literature, film and television.

Esther's publications include two monographs (Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond and The Spectral Metaphor: The Agency of Invisibility), edited volumes on Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (with Tjalling Valdés-Olmos), Planetary Hinterlands (with Pamila Gupta, Sarah Nuttall and Hanneke Stuit), Global Cultures of Contestation (with Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet and Thomas Poell); Peripheral Visions in a Globalizing World (with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (with María del Pilar Blanco) and The Spectralities Reader (with María del Pilar Blanco). 

Esther is series co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society (https://www.palgrave.com/de/series/15109) and Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race). 

From 2013 to 2017, Esther was Associate Professor of Globalization Studies at the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Before this, Esther studied English and Literary Studies at the University of Groningen and, with the support of a scholarship from NUFFIC and the British Council, completed an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford. In December 2005 she received her PhD at the University of Amsterdam. 

To contact Esther or to make an appointment, please send an email to: e.peeren@uva.nl.