Amanda Anderson

Amanda Anderson is the head of the English department at Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and taught at the University of Illinois before coming to Hopkins in 1999. She has been the Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature since 2002 and is currently Chair of the department. 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.

She is the author of "Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture" (Cornell, 1993) and "The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment" (Princeton, 2001). She has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, "Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle" (Princeton, 2002). She is currently completing a book entitled "The Way We Argue Now", which 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 Hopkins Anderson's 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.