Cathy Caruth (born 1955) is the 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.
Cathy Caruth is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (Johns Hopkins UP: 1991), Unclaimed Experience (Johns Hopkins UP: 1996 & 2016), Literature in the Ashes of History (Johns Hopkins UP: 2013) and Listening to Trauma (Johns Hopkins UP: 2014). She is also the 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 UP: 1995).
In November 2017, Cathy Caruth began undertaking The Ape Testimony Project in concert with Laurent Dubreuil.