Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis. She is also Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA - http://asca.uva.nl). With Jeroen de Kloet, she is series editor of Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society (https://www.palgrave.com/de/series/15109).

Esther's research 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 (with Hanneke Stuit, she coordinates the ASCA research group The Peripheries Project). 

From September 2018, Esther will lead the ERC-funded project "Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World." Using a comparative approach, she will examine, with a team of PhD and postdoc researchers, 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, which affects how the rural can be mobilised politically. The countries compared are the UK, the US, the Netherlands, China and South Africa.

Other research interests are popular culture, 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.

Recent publications include an article (co-authord with Irina Souch) on the role of the rural idyll in the Dutch reality TV show Farmer Wants a Wife in the Journal for Rural Studies (2019); an article on the affective dimension of the political mobilization of the rural in Landscape Research (2018); a volume (co-edited with Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet and Thomas Poell) on Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave, 2018); a volume (co-edited with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg) enitled Peripheral Visions in a Globalizing World (Brill 2016); and contributions to the Terra Critica publication Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (Meson Press, 2017). 

Previous publications focus on spectrality: the use of the metaphor of the ghost (and haunting) as a theoretical concept. Esther's second monograph - The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) - examines the relationship between spectrality, precarity and agency in cultural representations of subjects perceived as ghostly (migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons). With Maria del Pilar Blanco of the University of Oxford she edited the volumes Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Continuum, 2010) and The Spectralities Reader (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has also published articles about spectrality in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures.

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.

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. Her dissertation was published in 2008 as  Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond with Stanford University Press.

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