Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Known as a scholar of Latin American literature written since 1800, Pratt studies postcolonial criticism and theory, cultural studies, women and print culture, literary discourse and ideology, travel literature, and modern prose fiction. Specifically, the topics of her research have concerned verb forms in the African Kikuyu language, ideology and speech-act theory, new visions in culture and citizenship and the “traffic in meaning.” Pratt’s published work includes Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse; Linguistics for Students of Literature; and Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Professor Pratt has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She served as president of the Modern Language Association in 2003.