Educational Background
PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2019)
MA, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2014)
BA, Vanderbilt University (2012)
Current Courses
HUM 2052: Civ 2: Renaissance–Modern: "Therefore I Am: Tracing the Western Subject from 1500–Now"
HUM 2213: Brit & Amer Lit 2: "Troubled Selves"
HUM 3201: Literary Theory, "How to Read a Zombie Apocalypse"
Selected Publications
Monographs
Selling Books with Algorithms. Cambridge Univeristy Press. Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture Series. 2024.
Making World Literature: Actors, Institutions, and Network in the United States since 1890. University of Massachusetts Press. Page and Screen Series. December 2024.
Articles
“‘In Accord with the Spirit of American Democracy’: Tracing the Network of the U.S. Armed Services Editions.” American Literature, vol. 95, no. 4, 2023. 671–699.
“Making and Reading World Literature in a Pandemic: Global Logistics in Ling Ma’s Severance.” Journal of World Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 2022. 184–201. Special issue edited by David Damrosch.
“Cut, Copyright, Paste: Proliferating Print Networks in Susan Howe’s Melville’s Marginalia.”Book History, vol. 24, no. 2, 2021. 476–498.
“Anthologizing Race: Folk, Volk and Untranslation in the Weimar Republic.”Journal of World Literature, vol. 3, no. 4, 2018. 552–575.
“Decapitation, Pregnancy, and the Tongue: The Body as Political Metaphor in Measure for Measure.”Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2018. 1–19.
Translations
Translation of “Blick in den Strom” by Nikolaus Lenau, in Poems on Rivers, ed. Henry Hughes. Everyman’s Library, 2022.
Research
Making World Literature
From universities to governments, the Big Five publishers to Amazon, the influence of institutions abounds in US publishing. A diverse array of books from around the globe have been made into world literature in the US, selected by editors, publishers, and bureaucrats, produced by non-profits and for-profit presses of all sizes, and distributed through schools, publishing programs, and bookstores. The resulting world literary canon is the product of complex negotiations between individual preferences and institutional mandates, as well as economic, cultural, and pedagogical logics. While book publishing has fallen increasingly under the sway of global capitalism, yet the literary world remains made up of a series of individuals making choices about whom to fund, teach, translate, edit, and publish. The “world” of world literature, Anna Muenchrath argues, is a heterogeneous network of people whose circulation of literature is necessarily imbricated in the market economy, but whose selections might resist that economy and open new literary futures. Through archival research and close readings, this book considers what those participating are trying to do in circulating a text, and what communities they are helping to form or strengthen.
Making World Literature posits that network theory can effectively model the agency of actors and institutions in the literary field, making visible both the long-term accrual of power, as well as the choices of authors, translators, editors, and readers who do not simply replicate the values of a global literary marketplace, but divert, question, and undermine them. Muenchrath closely examines the paratexts and archival documents surrounding moments of global circulation in and through institutions like US world literature anthologies, the Council of Books in Wartime, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Oprah’s Book Club, and Amazon’s translation imprint. The granularity of these case studies reveals the increasingly limited agency of the individual in the global literary field, demonstrating how such players are important actors, and how their choices open up further options for later actors seeking to take texts down new paths toward or after publication.
Selling Books with Algorithms
In 1997 Amazon started as a small online bookseller. It is now the largest bookseller in the US and one of the largest companies in the world, due, in part, to its implementation of algorithms and access to user data. This Element explains how these algorithms work, and specifically how they recommend books and make them visible to readers. It argues that framing algorithms as felicitous or infelicitous allows us to reconsider the imagined authority of an algorithm's recommendation as a culturally situated performance. It also explores the material effects of bookselling algorithms on the forms of labor of the bookstore. The Element ends by considering future directions for research, arguing that the bookselling industry would benefit from an investment in algorithmic literacy.
