Amanda Anderson

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor for the Humanities at Brown University, and director of Brown's Cogut Center for the Humanities. She was director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, a Guggenheim Fellowship awardee in 2009, and an American author. Until the spring of 2012, she was a Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and the head of the English department at Johns Hopkins University.

Career

Anderson received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and taught at the University of Illinois before coming to Johns Hopkins in 1999. She specializes in Victorian literature and contemporary literary, cultural, and political theory. Her work on the Victorian period has focused on the relation between forms of modern thought and knowledge (across both literature and the human sciences) and understandings of selfhood, social life, and ethics.

Her most recent book, The Way We Argue Now, analyzes a number of influential theoretical debates over the past decade or so, with special attention to the forms of argument that shape work in pragmatism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, and proceduralism.

At Johns Hopkins, her recent graduate teaching has included courses on forms of argument in contemporary theory; Victorian internationalism; Victorian realism; and ethics and aesthetics in Victorian literature. She has taught undergraduate courses on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, nineteenth-century British fiction, and Victorian poetry and nonfiction prose.

In July 2015, she was appointed as the director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University.

Awards

• 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship

Works

• Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture Cornell University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-8014-2781-7
• The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton University Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0-691-07497-9.
• Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Princeton University Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-691-08962-1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help)
• The Way We Argue Now. Princeton University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-691-11404-0.