Rate My Professor Nicole Anderson

Nicole Anderson is Professor in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Sydney, within the Faculty of Arts. She completed her PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney in 2005, with the thesis titled "Derrida: An Ethics of Practice." Her academic interests encompass animal studies, ethics, cultural studies, biopolitics, continental philosophy, poststructuralism, posthumanism, and particularly the scholarship on French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Derridean deconstruction. Anderson's distinguished career trajectory features prominent administrative appointments, including Head of the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University, Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Arts at the same institution, and Director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University, USA. She holds concurrent roles as affiliate faculty at Arizona State University, Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, Professor Honoris Causa for the International Institute for Hermeneutics at Warsaw University, Poland, and member of the Global Indigenous Futures Research Centre and Ethics and Agency Research Centre at Macquarie University.

Anderson's scholarly output includes the monograph Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure (Continuum and Bloomsbury Press, 2012), the co-edited volume Cultural Theory in Everyday Practice (Oxford University Press, 2008), and numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters such as "Animal-human differences: the deconstructive force of posthumanism" (2023), "Pre- and posthuman animals: the limits and possibilities of animal-human relations" (2017), and "The Ethics of consensual cannibalism: deconstructing the human-animal dichotomy" (2010). She is completing a second book on Derrida, forthcoming in 2026. As founding Editor-in-Chief of the Derrida Today journal (Edinburgh University Press, since 2007), she has shaped discourse in deconstruction studies worldwide. Anderson also founded and directs the international Derrida Today Conferences, held across Britain, the USA, Europe, and Australia. Her impact extends to securing a prestigious Australian Research Council Linkage Grant with Professor John Potts to digitize philanthropist John Kaldor’s art collection and co-curate its exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2019, as well as co-producing the PBS podcast series The Futures of Democracy with Professor Julian Knowles. She delivers public lectures, including the series The Meaning of Life and Other Inconveniences, masterclasses on "The Animal That Therefore I Am," and talks on animal ethics and environments.