Cathy Caruth (born 1955) 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 (Johns
Hopkins UP, 1991), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Johns Hopkins
UP, 1996), Literature in the Ashes of History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) and Listening to
Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic
Experience (Johns Hopkins UP, forthcoming 2014). She is also editor of Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and co-editor 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 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 (Harvard
University Press, 2002), pp. 173–182, n.3.