Cathy Caruth


Cathy Caruth is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University and is appointed in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She taught previously at Yale and at Emory University, where she helped build the Department of Comparative Literature. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988 and is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Literature in the Ashes of History and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. She is also editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory and co-editor with Deborash Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing. 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.” For a good discussion of both Caruth's work on trauma theory see Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, and Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, pp. 173–182, n.3.