Muenchrath, Anna
Anna Muenchrath
Assistant Professor | College of Psych. and Liberal Arts: School of Arts and Communication
Contact Information
Expertise
Personal Overview
My research focuses on the global circulation of literary texts and translations in the 20th and 21st centuries. My current project, which in 2025–2026 is being supported by an ACLS Research Fellowship, interrogates the ways that algorithms on sites like Amazon influence that circulation and how they might affect what and how we read. My classes, regardless of topic, focus on the interpretation and analysis of texts in a high-trust, low-stress interactive environment. My goal is for students to hone their analytical skills by approaching texts from a variety of perspectives.
Now Available: Making World Literature (UMass Press) and Selling Books with Algorithms (Cambridge UP)
Educational Background
PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2019)
MA, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2014)
BA, Vanderbilt University (2012)
Professional Experience
Executive Director, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (2025–)
Current Courses
HUM 3999: Capstone Research Methods
Acts as the first step in the two-course capstone sequence. Covers conducting research in the humanities, and applying knowledge and research skills acquired to writing required for capstone project. Requires working with a capstone faculty member to gather materials necessary for thesis and capstone proposal and project.
Past 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. 2024.
Articles
“The Signal in the Noise: Hermeneutics and/of Computational Literary Sociology.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 19, no. 1, 2025. 149–167. Special issue on “Literary Sociology” edited by Urs Büttner, Carolin Amlinger, and David Christopher Assmann.
“Anthologizing the World for American Readers around 1900.” College Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, 2024. 532–559. Special issue of College Literature on “American Institutions around 1900” edited by Sheila Liming, Florian Sedlmeier, and Alexander Starre.
“‘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
Current Project
Past Research
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.