Amanda Anderson

Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English

Prof. Amanda Anderson is a literary scholar and theorist who has written on nineteenth-century literature and culture, as well as on contemporary debates in the humanities. She is the director of an interdisciplinary summer institute, The School of Criticism and Theory, which is currently hosted by Cornell University. Prior to joining the Brown faculty in 2012, she taught at Johns Hopkins, where she served as chair of the Department of English from 2003-2009. Dr. Anderson’s research addresses broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relation of art and politics. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993).