Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth (born 1955) is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988 and is the author of "Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud" (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) and "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996); she is also editor of "Trauma: Explorations in Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and with Deborash Esch of "Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing" (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.”

For a polemical discussion of Caruth's work, see Ruth Leys, "Trauma: A Genealogy" (University of Chicago Press, 2000). For a good discussion of both Caruth's work on trauma theory and the stakes of Leys' polemic, see Shoshana Felman's "The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century" (Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 173-182, n.3.

*worldcat id|lccn-n90-644377