Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre

Sarah Chihaya is an Assistant Professor in English at Princeton University, where she specializes in contemporary fiction and film. She is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (with Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards; Columbia U.P. 2020), and co-editor, with Joshua Kotin and Kinohi Nishikawa, of “How to Be Now,” a special issue of Post45. Her essays and reviews can be found in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books, among other places. She is currently at work on a book titled Bibliophobia: Misreading and Being Misread, a meditation on reading practices, bad feelings, and the writing of criticism.

Merve Emre is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America; The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator; and co-author of The Ferrante Letters. In 2019, she was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is currently finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities.