Catherine Reilly

Cate I. Reilly (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Princeton University, 2017) is a scholar of literature and theory. Her research focuses on comparative modernisms, the relationship between science and culture in a global frame (with special attention to psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, and the neurosciences), internationalism in the wake of decolonization, and globalization’s impact on subject formation.

Her first book, Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State (Columbia University Press, 2024. Modernist Latitudes Series) makes the case for a modernist literary prehistory to today’s increasingly globalized and assertively homogenized standards for mental health and illness. The book traces the intersection between the systematization of psychiatric disease categories and the rise of modern nation states. Modernist aesthetic works from Germany, Austro-Hungary and Eastern Europe reveal the hidden story of how nineteenth-century efforts to standardize mental illness categories for national populations conditioned the terms and presuppositions undergirding the contemporary DSM and cognitive neurosciences. These texts historicize the mind sciences’ formation, rather than offering narratives of diagnosable mental illnesses.

Her second manuscript in preparation, The End of the World Literature engages debates on World Literature from a perspective informed by eco-criticism and the neurohumanities. The book offers an alternative epistemology of World Literature that recognizes the essential role of the postwar conflicts in shaping the definition of the world.