Amanda Anderson

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is a literary scholar and theorist who has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture as well as on contemporary debates in literary and cultural theory.

Career Anderson received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University.

She taught at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign from 1989 until 1999 when she joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. She was Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature from 2002 to 2012 and the head of the English department from 2003 to 2009.

She was appointed Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and served as Director of the School from 2008 until 2014, when she was appointed Honorary Senior Fellow.

In 2012, she joined the faculty at Brown University as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English.

At the institute, she developed the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, which sponsors a doctoral certificate in Collaborative Humanities. She has anchored the co-taught capstone course of the certificate, a Project Development Workshop, since 2019. The certificate and capstone course draw doctoral students from across the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. In her role as director she has also served on the advisory board of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes since 2017.

She delivered the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford in November 2015 under the title “Psyche and Ethos”. They were published in book form by Oxford University Press in 2018.

From 2020–2023, she hosted the Cogut Institute’s podcast series “Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities.” The show features scholars speaking about a broad array of topics in the humanities, including environmental humanities, AI and big data, disability studies, critical university studies, and collaborative projects in mental health, virtual reality, happiness studies, and Black studies.

Awards

2022 Presidential Award Lecture, Brown University 2020 John B. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities, American Academy in Berlin 2019–2020 Berlin Prize, American Academy in Berlin 2014–present Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Criticism and Theory 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship 2008 Ward Phillips Lectures, University of Notre Dame, March 2008 2006–2007 Magnet Scholar, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut 2006–2014 Senior Fellow, School of Criticism and Theory

Work Much of Anderson’s scholarship and teaching have centered on nineteenth-century literature and the relation between forms of modern thought and knowledge and understandings of selfhood, social life, and ethics, but increasingly she also focuses broadly on the nature of argumentation and discourse. In The Way We Argue Now, she analyzes a number of influential contemporary theoretical debates, with special attention to the forms of argument that shape work in pragmatism, feminism, cosmopolitanism, and proceduralism.

In her 2012 TedxBrownUniversity talk, she reflects on the “distinctive value of the humanities” and argues that the humanities “open one up to an appreciation and an understanding of the centrality of the questions of value to the human experience.” After Max Weber, she describes the humanities as engaged in a labor of “clarification”: “in assessing works in the humanities, one comes to a better understanding of what one values and how given what one values one can make any number of practical and ethical decisions.”