Dr Mary Louise Pratt FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2026
Summary
Born and raised in English Canada, Professor Pratt studied Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, working in French, Spanish, English and Portuguese. She completed an MA in Linguistics at the University of Illinois, specialising in Bantu linguistics.
Returning to literary studies, she completed a doctorate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University (1975), emphasising Modern Latin American literature and literary theory. Her thesis 'Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse', became her first book (1977). In 1976, she joined the faculty at Stanford, in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, and Comparative Literature. With Elizabeth Traugott she co-authored 'Linguistics for Students of Literature' (1980), still widely used. She co-founded the Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America, a research group that pioneered the study of Latin American women writers.
In 2002 she moved to New York University, where she co-founded the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Pratt’s ground-breaking book, 'Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation' first appeared in 1992, with a second edition in 2007.
Translated into Spanish Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, and Polish, it continues to be required reading in postcolonial studies. It shows how European travel writing represented and legitimated the imperial enterprise in the imaginations of European reading publics, creating what has been called the domestic subjects of imperial expansion.
Methodologically, the book introduced the concept of the “contact zone,” arguing that empire needed to be studied not from imperial centers, but at the sites of contact on imperial frontiers. Pratt’s work on Latin American Literature was collected in 'Los imaginarios planetarios' (2019).
Her current work on environmental aesthetics, ecological thought, and global indigeneity forms her most recent book, 'Planetary Longings' (2022). Pratt is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and former president of the Modern Language Association.