Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth is the Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. Caruth explores trauma and human suffering through literature; she is considered the pioneer of trauma studies within the humanities.

She is the author of five books: Trauma Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Literature in the Ashes of History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Caruth received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.