Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth (born 1955) is a leading theorist in Trauma Studies. She focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language.

Professor Cathy Caruth
Caruth in her office, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2017)
Born	Catherine Lynne Caruth
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)
Academic work
Discipline	Psychoanalytic theory
Institutions	Yale University (1986-1995) Emory University (1995-2011) Cornell University (2011-present)

Education and career

Caruth graduated cum laude from Princeton University and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale. She taught at Yale, then Emory, where she developed an archive of Holocaust testimony.

She is currently Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the departments of Literatures in English and Comparative Literature.

Selected publications

• Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP. 1995. ISBN 978-0801-85007-3.

• 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. 1996. ISBN 978-0-801-89619-4.

• Literature in the Ashes of History. Johns Hopkins UP. 2013. ISBN 978-1-421-41155-2.

• Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. Johns Hopkins UP. 2014. ISBN 978-1-421-41446-1.