Aili Pettersson Peeker is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests center around narrative theory, cognitive literary studies, and the ethics of reading. She is currently working on questions of narrative ethics in general, and the forms, functions, limits, and possibilities of narrative empathy in particular. She mostly studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literature and has published essays on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and Dave Eggers’ The Circle. She holds an M.A. in Literature – Culture – Media from Lund University, Sweden, where her master’s thesis explored the relationship between second-person narration and empathy in David Foster Wallace’s short stories.

Contact:  apetterssonpeeker@umail.ucsb.edu