Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.

[15][16] Van Peer was Vice President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA, 1996–1998), Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA, 2000–2003) and President of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL, 2004–2006).

The Research for the Development of Empirical Studies project (REDES, 2002–2012) was inaugurated when Willie van Peer and Frank Hakemulder[18] (Utrecht University) 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 [19] (then Kyiv National Linguistic University) to join.

[20] For a decade, the REDES international research group investigated culture, literature, language and media from a multicultural perspective.