Cathy Caruth is the Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University and is also appointed in the department of Comparative Literature, which she chairs. 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. Caruth is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (Hopkins: 1991), Unclaimed Experience (Hopkins: 1996 & 2016), Literature in the Ashes of History (Hopkins: 2013) and Listening to Trauma (Hopkins: 2014). She is also the editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Hopkins: 1995) and co-editor with Deborash Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (Rutgers: 1995).

In relation to the Humanities Lab, Cathy Caruth is the co-director of The Ape Testimony Project as well as a key collaborator of a project on visual art and bonobos.