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Merve Emre is a Turkish-American author, academic, and literary critic. She is the author of nonfiction books Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017) and The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018), and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.
Formerly a professor at McGill and Oxford, she moved to Wesleyan University in 2023.
Emre earned her PhD in English literature from Yale University and thereafter joined the English department faculty at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In 2018, she was appointed an associate professor of American literature at Oxford University.
In 2023, Emre was named the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University as well as director of the school's Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism.
Emre's literary criticism focuses principally on "form and style", which she contends is missing from much of today's criticism. "I continue to be surprised by how few critics actually engage with the text itself, how so much of the criticism is just a projection of people's feelings and a little bit of hand waving at plot and theme", Emre has said.
In 2017, Emre published Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (The University of Chicago Press). The Los Angeles Review of Books said that Paraliterary is about "bad readers", and "is appropriately conscious that throughout the 20th century, a disproportionate number of readers labeled bad were female." Emre published The Personality Brokers (Penguin Random House) a year later; it is a historical and biographical account of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers' invention of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline, and is reportedly working on a book to be titled The Female Cool, about "cold, cruel, unsentimental, unempathetic women writers and artists."
However, Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker, criticized Emre for using the "wrong context" to analyze the MBTI's historical antecedents and took issue with her credentials for critiquing the MBTI, arguing that "professors are the last people who should object to society's people-sorting operations." Louis Menand, himself a professor, in turn faced criticism for his review, including the charge that Menand betrayed a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how the MBTI was intended to be used.
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| 2019 | Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages & Literature | Recipient | |
| 2021 | Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism | Recipient | |
| 2021 | Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing | Recipient |
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