Merve Emre is a Turkish-American author, academic, and literary critic. She is the author of nonfiction books The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing and Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. Emre is an associate professor of American literature at Oxford University.
After graduating from Harvard in 2007, Emre worked for six months as a marketing consultant at Bain & Company. Emre says that she was a "terrible consultant" and spent most of her time at Bain studying for the literature GRE under her desk. It was at Bain that Emre first took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which would later be the subject of her second work of nonfiction, The Personality Brokers. 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.
Works
Emre has written extensively about the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante, including a lengthy essay on Ferrante's collaboration with HBO on the television series, My Brilliant Friend, based on Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. Ferrante, a famously private author who uses an alias, agreed to field questions for Emre's essay on the HBO series, resulting in a two-month correspondence between the two. She has argued against the position taken by other writers and critics, including Alexander Chee, that Ferrante's identity is irrelevant to her work; Emre contends that it is "precisely refusal of the biographical, and her subsequent representation of that refusal, that has lodged the biographical ever deeper into the heart of what she writes." 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 Los AngelesReview 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 a year later; it is a historical and biographical account of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers' invention of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 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."
Reception
The Personality Brokers generally received favorable reviews. The New York Times called the work "inventive and beguiling." The Wall Street Journal called it a "riveting" book to which Emre brought "the skills of a detective, cultural critic, historian, scientist and biographer." The Personality Brokers was listed in the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 and named one of The Economist's "books of the year" for 2018. 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.
Personal life
Emre lives in Oxford, England, with her husband and two children.
