Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on marginalization, spectrality, and the impact of globalization on rural areas. From 2018 to 2024, she led the ERC-funded project Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World, examining how literature, film, and television shape perceptions and political mobilizations of rural life across five countries. Peeren co-edits the Palgrave book series Globalization, Culture and Society. Her publications include the monographs Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture (2008) and The Spectral Metaphor (2014), and many co-edited volumes, including Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (2025), Planetary Hinterlands (2024), Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (2019), and The Spectralities Reader (2013). Peeren holds degrees from the University of Groningen and the University of Oxford, and earned her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2005.