Merve
Emre

Merve Emre is a critic, essayist, and scholar whose work explores the intersections of literature, personality, intellectual history, and contemporary culture. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and directs the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism.

Emre is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Personality Brokers, a cultural history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that was named one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and others, and later inspired the CNN/HBO Max documentary Persona. Her other books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and The Ferrante Letters. She has also edited influential editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the essay collection Once and Future Feminist.

A contributing writer at The New Yorker, Emre’s criticism and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

She is currently completing Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study and writing a new book, Love and Other Useless Pursuits.