Cathy Caruth

Professor Cathy Caruth
Dr. Caruth in her office, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2017)
Born	Catherine Lynne Caruth December 1955
Known for	Unclaimed Experience (1996)
Title	Class of 1916 Professor of English
Academic background
Education	Princeton University (1977) Yale University (1988)
Alma mater	Yale University
Thesis	'Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud' (1989)
Influences	Geoffrey Hartman Paul de Man Freud Jacques Derrida Robert Jay Lifton Shoshana Felman Barbara Johnson Jean Laplanche Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Walter Benjamin Hannah Arendt Jean-Francois Lyotard
Academic work
Discipline	Psychoanalytic theory
Sub-discipline	Cognitive psychology Cultural Studies Sociology of culture Animal Studies
Institutions	Yale University (1986-1995) Emory University (1995-2011) Cornell University (2011-present)
Notable students	Amy Ziering Lynne Huffer
Main interests	Literary theory Psychological trauma Traumatic memories Collective trauma Traumatic stress Historical trauma Post-traumatic stress disorder Freud's psychoanalytic theories Deconstruction Political theory Empiricism Jewish history Kant

Cathy Caruth (born 1955) succeeded Jonathan Culler as Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the departments of Literatures in English and Comparative Literature. After graduating cum laude from Princeton University, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale, where she studied the poetry of William Wordsworth alongside Professor Geoffrey Hartman. She taught at Yale and at Emory University, where she developed an archive of Holocaust testimony and co-organized a national interdisciplinary conference on trauma. When Caruth arrived at Emory after teaching English at Yale University, she began to sculpt a fledgling Comparative Literature program that was primarily graduate-level. She helped to build and expand the program very significantly during her time at the university.

Caruth is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud. Johns Hopkins UP. 1991. ISBN 978-0-801-89648-4., Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Johns Hopkins UP. 2010. ISBN 978-0-801-89619-4., Literature in the Ashes of History. Johns Hopkins UP. 2013. ISBN 978-1-421-41155-2. and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. Johns Hopkins UP. 2014. ISBN 978-1-421-41446-1. She is also editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and co-editor with Deborah Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. describes her as “one of the most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon.” According to Jonathan Culler, “Caruth was one of the first to realize the importance of trauma theory for the humanities. Working closely with psychoanalysts and psychologists to bring techniques of literary interpretation to bear on questions about the meaning of survival, and the nature of witnessing, she edited two historically important issues of American Imago on Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma. Exploring trauma as a model for thinking about relations between history and experience, her books have made her a leader in this field which she partly created.” For a good discussion of Caruth's highly influential work on trauma theory, see The Trauma Question. Routledge. 2013. ISBN 978-1-136-01502-1., 4–5, and The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Harvard. 2002. ISBN 978-0-674-00931-8., 173–182, n.3.

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