Amanda Anderson

Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, serves as Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, a position she has held since 2015. In the field of Literature, her scholarship centers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, critical theory, intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the intersections of literature, moral life, and politics. She earned a B.A. in English magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1981, followed by an M.A. in 1988 and Ph.D. in 1989 from Cornell University. Anderson's career includes service as assistant professor from 1989 to 1995 and associate professor from 1995 to 1999 in the Department of English, Women's Studies Program, and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; professor from 1999 to 2012 at Johns Hopkins University, where she held the Caroline Donovan Professorship of English Literature from 2002 to 2012; and her current appointment at Brown since 2012. Previously, she directed the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University from 2008 to 2014, now serving as Honorary Senior Fellow, and has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes since 2017.

Anderson has authored influential books including Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 1993), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2018; based on Clarendon Lectures), and Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2019; with Rita Felski and Toril Moi). Forthcoming is Humanities Theory (Oxford University Press, 2025; with Simon During). She co-edited A Companion to George Eliot (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002). Her honors include the Berlin Prize and John P. Birkelund Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin (2019-2020), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2009-2010), Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University (2015), and Presidential Award Lecture at Brown University (2022). Anderson leads the Cogut Institute’s Collaborative Humanities Initiative and delivers lectures on topics such as political psychology, literary form, and method debates in literary studies.

Professional Email: Amanda_Anderson@brown.edu