Cathy Caruth
American academic (born 1955)

Professor
Cathy Caruth
Caruth in 2017
Born
Catherine Lynne Caruth

(1955-01-01) January 1, 1955 (age 71)
Known forUnclaimed Experience (1996)
TitleClass of 1916 Professor of English
Academic background
Education
Alma materYale University
ThesisEmpirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (1989)
Doctoral advisorGeoffrey H. Hartman
Academic work
DisciplinePsychoanalytic theory
Institutions

Cathy Caruth (born 1955) is a leading theorist in Trauma Studies who teaches in the Departments of Literatures in English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Described by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. as “one of the most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon,” she focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of languages.[1][2]

Early Life

Caruth's mother was Elaine J. Caruth, a psychoanalyst and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA.[3]

Education

Caruth graduated cum laude from Princeton University, majoring in Comparative Literature. She then pursued her education in the Economic Planning Board (EPB), in Korea, which she completed in 1979. Later, she studied for two months in Italy, then in 1988 completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in Comparative Literature.[4] Her thesis was subsequently published as a book by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 1991, titled Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud.

Career

Caruth has held positions at Yale, Emory, and Cornell Universities, currently serving as Class of 1916 Professor of English.[5] She has contributed to journals like American Imago, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, Studies in Romanticism, PMLA and Sage Encyclopedia of Trauma, and serves as a contributing editor for several publications.[6] She has held visiting positions at Cambridge, Princeton, Toronto, and Kansas Universities.[7]

Between 1995 and 1998, Caruth played a significant role in building the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory, serving as the program's director and becoming the Department Chair in 2006. During this time, she also helped develop an archive of Holocaust testimony. Her work in this area was influenced by her time at Yale, where she witnessed the founding of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.[8]

In 1996, Caruth published her seminal text, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, which remains a staple in curricula across psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, and law. She argued trauma is not the event but the mind’s failure to process it, producing "latency" where it returns belatedly as flashbacks or nightmares. She defines trauma as follows:

Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.[9]

This delay leaves traumatic histories "unclaimed," persisting through haunting. Literature uniquely conveys the "unspeakable" via gaps, silences, and fragmented narratives—aporias revealing survival truths. Caruth extended trauma beyond individuals, viewing history as interconnected traumas linking personal and collective memory.[10][11]

In 2010, Caruth was appointed as the M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor in English.[12] She moved from Emory to Cornell in 2011 and was named Class of 1916 Professor of English in 2020.[13]

In 2017, she co-launched The Ape Testimony Project, an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the intersection of language and non-human experience.[14] Caruth participated in workshops and public forums at Cornell on the subject of primates and the ethics of cross-species communication and sustainability. In 2025, she gave a presentation on the intergenerational legacy of Kanzi the bonobo, in which she explored how the "encounter" between humans and bonobos creates a new language that cannot be the object of a single discipline.[15]

In 2018, Caruth appeared on Ukrainian media in an interview for Hromadske in which she brought her academic theories into a real-world dialogue with a society actively undergoing a period of intense conflict and historical re-evaluation.[16]

In 2020, Caruth gave a virtual presentation at St Berchmans College Changanassery on trauma theory and the problem of "address," drawing on Shoshana Felman and the Eichmann Trial to describe trauma's return as involuntary repetition which acts as a "command to understand" what was initially ungraspable, compelling survivors into a new mode of witness that bridges death and life.[17]

Caruth participated in a webinar hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University in 2020 titled "The Future of Trauma: African Scholars Thinking with Cathy Caruth," which served as the inaugural event for a Trauma Studies Group series aimed at interrogating and expanding Western trauma theory through African perspectives. A group of early-career African scholars engaged with Caruth to examine the language and transmission of trauma, how the physical body registers trauma, new ways of expressing traumatic experiences in drama and performance, and transgenerational healing.[18]

Selected publications

  • Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud. Johns Hopkins UP. 1991. ISBN 978-0-801-89648-4.[19]
  • Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP. 1995. ISBN 978-0801-85007-3.
  • Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Johns Hopkins UP. 1996. ISBN 978-0-801-89619-4.[20]
  • 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.[21]

References

  1. ^ Caruth, Cathy (2020). "Editors and Contributors". On History and Memory in Arab Literature and Western Poetics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved January 13, 2026.
  2. ^ "Cathy Caruth | Literatures in English". Cornell. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  3. ^ Felman, Shoshana (2014). "Fire in the Archive: The Alignment of Witness". The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing. New York and London: Routledge. Retrieved January 12, 2026.
  4. ^ "Bio-note of Prof. Cathy Caruth" (PDF). Jamia Millia Islamia. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  5. ^ "Cathy Caruth | Literatures in English". Cornell. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  6. ^ "An 'out of the box' perspective by Cathy Caruth | Literatures in English". Dina Mossaad. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  7. ^ "Bio-note of Prof. Cathy Caruth" (PDF). Jamia Millia Islamia. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  8. ^ "Caruth injects trauma into comparative literature | Emory University". Emory Report. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  9. ^ Caruth, Cathy (1991). Unclaimed experience: trauma and the possibility of history. JSTOR: Yale French Studies. p. 181. Retrieved January 19, 2026.
  10. ^ "Conference to focus on work of trauma scholar Cathy Caruth". Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  11. ^ "Trauma Studies". Literariness. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  12. ^ "Cathy Caruth lectures on psychoanalysis, history | Cornell University". Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  13. ^ "Bio-note of Prof. Cathy Caruth" (PDF). Jamia Millia Islamia. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  14. ^ "Cathy Caruth - The Ape Testimony Project | Cornell University". Cornell blogs. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  15. ^ "Kanzi's Legacy". Humanities Lab at Cornell. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  16. ^ "Healing War Trauma in Ukraine". hromadske. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  17. ^ "Trauma, Language and Survival - Cathy Caruth". YouTube. December 22, 2020. Event occurs at 0:00. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  18. ^ "African Scholars Thinking with Cathy Caruth". AVReQ. Retrieved January 11, 2026.
  19. ^ Reviews of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions
    • Baker, John (1994). "Review of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud". Comparative Literature Studies. 31 (2): 187–190. ISSN 0010-4132.
    • Hanley, Keith (1993). "Review of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud". The Modern Language Review. 88 (2): 408–409. doi:10.2307/3733771. ISSN 0026-7937.
  20. ^ Reviews of Unclaimed Experience
    • Ramadanovic, Petar (1998). Caruth, Cathy (ed.). "When "To Die in Freedom" Is Written in English". Diacritics. 28 (4): 54–67. ISSN 0300-7162.
    • Sadoff, Dianne F. (1997). "Review of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; Freud and the Passions". South Atlantic Review. 62 (4): 104–108. doi:10.2307/3200758. ISSN 0277-335X.
  21. ^ Review of Listening to Trauma
    • Willbern, David; Caruth, Cathy (2017). "Review of Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, CaruthCathy". American Imago. 74 (2): 187–208. ISSN 0065-860X.

See also


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