Frans Willem Korsten

Frans Willem Korsten is working both at the department of Literary Studies at the University of Leiden, and at the Faculty of History and Arts at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair for Literature and Society since May 2007 in the name of Stichting Letteren en samenleving Rotterdam.

He was trained as a PhD between 1993 and 1998 at the University of Amsterdam by Mieke Bal and Frans van Eemeren. In his thesis, The Wisdom Brokers: Narrative's Interaction with Arguments in Cultural Critical Texts, Korsten used a new kind of rhetorical analysis, combining narratology and argumentation theory. His objects of analysis already indicated his major fascination since then: the entanglement of aesthetics and politics in different kinds of texts.

Since 2006 Frans Willem Korsten is Chairman of the section of Letters in the national Council of Culture (Raad voor Cultuur). He was chairman of the evaluation committee of Kosmopolis in 2009, and tutor at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam from 2003-2008.