Organizer: Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi – Ministry of Education (MHRD) SPARC Supported
About the Session
- When: 8th April, 2022, 7:30-8:30 PM IST
- Free Session- Open to All
- Platform: Zoom and YouTube
Lecture By: Prof. Cathy Caruth
Department of Literatures in English and Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University
YouTube Link: Join Here
Zoom Meeting: Join Here
Meeting ID: 835 3842 7371
Passcode: lecturedls
About the Author
Prof. Cathy Caruth teaches at the Department of Literatures in English together with the Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University where she succeeded Jonathan Culler as Class of 1916 Professor of Literatures in English. She has taught previously at Yale and at Emory University, where she built the Department of Comparative Literature. As a founding figure of Trauma Theory, Prof Caruth focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language.
Prof Caruth’s illustrious and distinguished career started in 1986 at the Department of English at Yale University and in 2006 she went on to become the Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature in Emory University. In 2010, she became the M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor in English at Cornell University and is presently working as Frank H T Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters in Cornell University.
Prof Caruth has received several Honours and held many Special Appointments at leading universities. To name a few, she was the Mellon Visiting Fellow at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University in 2011. In 2013, she was invited as Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English, Princeton University. She has also held the position of Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at the University of Toronto. She was also a Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Kansas in 2015.
She is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; 2016), Literature in the Ashes of History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). She is also the editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) and co-editor with Deborah Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (Rutgers University Press, 1995). She has been described as “one of the most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon.”
Prof Caruth is on the Editorial Boards or Advisory Boards of several journals, including Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, Sage Encyclopaedia of Trauma, Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Journal of Psychohistory.
Prof Cathy Caruth was the first to introduce the term “trauma theory” and she concentrated also on the representation of trauma in different literary works, such as books and/or films. Prof. Caruth has managed to implement her literary background in understanding the concept of trauma through examining the genealogy of trauma and proposing a new theory that explains trauma and its many articulations.