Muenchrath, Anna

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Anna Muenchrath

Assistant Professor | College of Psych. and Liberal Arts: School of Arts and Communication

amuenchrath@fit.edu
(321) 674-3106
Crawford 615

world literature, literary sociology, book history, print culture, translation studies, algorithms, modernism, 20th century literature, 21st century literature

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 2025–26 is being supported by an , interrogates the ways that big data influences that circulation and how it affects 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: (UMass Press) and (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:

HUM 2213: Brit & Amer Lit 2:

HUM 3201: Literary Theory, ""

Selected Publications

Monographs

. Cambridge Univeristy Press. Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture Series. 2024.

. University of Massachusetts Press. Page and Screen Series. 2024.

Articles

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.

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.

American Literature, vol. 95, no. 4, 2023. 671–699.

Journal of World Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, 2022. 184–201. Special issue edited by David Damrosch.

Book History, vol. 24, no. 2, 2021. 476–498.

Journal of World Literature, vol. 3, no. 4, 2018. 552–575.

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.

Recognition & Awards

2025

2022

Research

Current Project

Amazon Crossing, a publishing imprint of Amazon.com, is now the leading publisher of translations in the United States. Grounded methodologically in literary sociology and critical algorithm studies, this project conducts a quantitative analysis of the corpus of translations published by Amazon Crossing compared to those produced by the next four largest translation publishers. By focusing on patterns and outliers across variables like source language, genre, ratings, reviews, and gender, the project elicits insights into how Amazon Crossing’s use of algorithmically processed data—data created by humans in concert with the logic of search and recommendation algorithms on Amazon.com—shapes cultural production. Ultimately, the aim of this project is not only to provide insights into Amazon Crossing or even the translation market in the United States, but into how algorithms replace human judgment, as well as, crucially, what role humanities’ methods have to play in this investigation.

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.

In 1997 Amazon started as a small online bookseller. It is now the largest bookseller in the US and one of the largest companies in the world, due, in part, to its implementation of algorithms and access to user data. This Element explains how these algorithms work, and specifically how they recommend books and make them visible to readers. It argues that framing algorithms as felicitous or infelicitous allows us to reconsider the imagined authority of an algorithm's recommendation as a culturally situated performance. It also explores the material effects of bookselling algorithms on the forms of labor of the bookstore. The Element ends by considering future directions for research, arguing that the bookselling industry would benefit from an investment in algorithmic literacy.

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