Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English; Director, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University
John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Spring 2020
Amanda Anderson is the director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, addressing broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. Anderson earned her BA at Dartmouth College and PhD at Cornell University, and also taught at The Johns Hopkins University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell, 1993). Anderson serves on the board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and is Honorary Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.