Mary Louise Pratt

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she is also affiliated with the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Pratt’s publications include Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse and, the now iconic, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. A former President of the Modern Language Association, Pratt has received numerous honors, grants, and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Stanford, where she was the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities she was recipient of the Bing Fellowship for Distinguished Teaching and (twice) of the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.