PhD in English Language and Literature – Queen’s University, Canada 

MA in English Language and Literature – Carleton University, Canada 

BAH in English Language and Literature – Carleton University, Canada 

Dr. Carruthers completed her education in her home country of Canada. She has always, however, been a world traveler, interested in other cultures. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and lived as a child in the Philippines. Some of her most memorable travels have been walking the Camino de Santiago across Spain, touring Morocco, and tracing Sherlock Holmes’s literary adventures in London, UK.  

Dr. Carruthers’s current scholarly research focuses on the intersections of travel writing and world literature. She is in the process of developing her doctoral dissertation, “(Other)worldly Encounters: Foreignness in Contemporary Travel Writing,” for publication. This work proposes a new critical paradigm for understanding travel writing’s engagement with the foreign in the contemporary moment: (other)worldliness. The (other)worldly combines a preoccupation with the gritty, politically embedded, and anxiety-ridden reality of the global world (worldliness) with a spiritually inflected longing for some intangible sacred dimension to that reality (otherworldliness). It is a paradigm capable of illuminating the current dominance of two worldly imaginaries: globality and planetarity. Both imaginaries are concerned with the whole world—the former with the global flux and flow of late capitalism and the latter with earth-wide ecosystems, particularly as they are being affected by anthropogenic climate change. Foreignness, using this paradigm, operates as a threshold space, through which the traveler can interpret the world at the intersection of some manifestation of an otherworld. (Other)worldliness thus functions to explore how both worldliness and otherworldliness are constructed and operationalized in the ways travel writing and its critique, read the world.  

Dr. Carruthers is also currently working on a creative travel writing project, tentatively framed as The Book Trek, that ‘reads’ various places in the world through the lens of literature that is either set there or otherwise closely associated with it. In this way, she explores the various relationships between literature and place and how they invite us to interpret and shape the world.

“Extimate Pedagogies, Intimate Texts: Teaching South Asian Digital Diasporas.” Teaching South Asian Diasporic Literature, edited by Nalini Iyer and Pallavi Rastogi, Modern Languages Association, 2024, pp. 277-86. (First Writer; Co-written with Dr. Asha Varadharajan). 

“Translating Horror into Glory: Decolonizing Salvation in Joan Thomas’s Five Wives.” Collisions of Cultures: Frictions and Re-Shapings, edited by Lily Rose Tope and Wolfgang Zach, University of the Philippines Press, 2022, pp. 115-130.  

Dr. Carruthers currently teaches introductory composition courses at WKU.