Guests of the Bayreuth Academy in the last five years

Our Guests

Miss/es Dr. Esther Peeren

Inviting institution:	Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies
Stay:	13. Dezember 2017
Home university:	Universiteit van Amsterdam (Niederlande)
Personal information:	Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis. She is also vice-director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS - http://acgs.uva.nl) and vice-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). Other 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 English and American literature, film and television. Recent publications include an article on the compelling memory of 9/11 in Cultural Critique (2016), a volume (co-edited with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg) enitled Peripheral Visions in a Globalizing World (Brill 2016) and contributions to the open access publication Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary (Meson Press, 2017 - http://meson.press/books/symptoms-of-the-planetary-condition/). Many of Esther's publications focus on spectrality: the use of the metaphor of the ghost (and haunting) as a theoretical concept. Her latest 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, where she taught in the BA and MA, as well as in the research-MA Cultural Analysis. 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.   At the Academy, she held a lecture as part of the postdoc working group "Hauntology".