Anna Muenchrath

I am an Assistant Professor of English in the School of Arts and Communication at Florida Tech. My research interests include 20th and 21st century literature, theories of world literature and cultural production, literary sociology, translation studies, media studies, book history, and critical data and algorithm studies. For the 2025–26 academic year, my work is being supported by a fellowship from ACLS, the American Council of Learned Societies.

New Project: The World Republic of Data

When Amazon first founded its translation imprint, Amazon Crossing, in 2010 commentators were confused. Why would a multi-million-dollar corporation engage in the niche and financially risky endeavor of publishing literary translations, a job usually reserved for independent publishers subsidized by private foundations and federal grants? By 2015, Amazon Crossing was the largest translation publisher in the US, publishing primarily romances, mysteries, and thrillers into English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

The answer to Amazon Crossing’s success is data, specifically the profit to be made from translating reader data from one language into another. The World Republic of Data traces these acts of data translation, particularly as they pertain to concepts like time, genre, and gender, to argue that the literary marketplace has been transformed by the pursuit of data capital. By offering a look inside the black box of big data, the book reveals how its use affects what books are published, where they come from, and who makes them. As global cultural production becomes increasingly datafied, The World Republic of Data gives us the tools to think about how data shapes our reading possibilities.

Making World Literature

Selling Books with Algorithms