Authors

(University of Munich), PhD, Professor of Literary Studies and Intercultural Hermeneutics at the University of Munich, former President of IGEL (International Association for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media) and of PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association). He has been a 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. He is the author of several books and many articles on poetics and the epistemological foundations of literary studies. His book Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding (Croom Helm, London 1986) is the basis for empirical studies on the term “ostranenie”. He is the founder and the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Scientific Study of Literature (see: http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ssol/main). Together with his wife he founded the Mali-ka-di project dedicated to supporting selfrealization of Mali’s inhabitants (see: www.malikadi.org ). E-mail: w.vanpeer@gmail.com