Pembroke Center

Amanda Anderson

Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities

Biography

Amanda Anderson joined the Brown faculty in 2012 as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and became Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities in 2015. In 2020 she launched the podcast “Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities.” 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 the humanities. Her books include “Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Study” (with Rita Felski and Toril Moi), “Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology,” “Bleak Liberalism,” “The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory,” “The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment,” and “Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture.” She is co-editor of “George Eliot: A Companion,” and “Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.” From 2008-2014, she served as the director of the School of Criticism and Theory, an interdisciplinary summer institute hosted by Cornell University. She serves on the boards of the School of Criticism and Theory (as an Honorary Senior Fellow) and the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Prior to joining the Brown faculty, she was Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University.