Amanda Anderson's research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, addressing broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relation of art and politics. She is the author of Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (2018), Bleak Liberalism (2016), 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).

Amanda Anderson specializes in critical theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. Her work explores forms of self-understanding in modern literature and thought, disciplinary formation and methodology, and the place of critique and argumentation across philosophy and literature (with a special emphasis on liberalism and political philosophy). She is particularly interested in the legacies of philosophical modernity, the normative dimensions of contemporary academic thought in the humanities (its understanding of value), and the relation between argument and style. She is the author of Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature) (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). She has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 2002) and, with Harry Shaw, A Companion to George Eliot (Wiley, 2013).  Her current project explores topics in political psychology.

American Academy in Berlin, Spring 2020, for project entitled The Slow Time of Rumination: A Project in the Human Sciences)

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2009-2010, for book project entitled Bleak Liberalism (on the history of liberalism in nineteenth and twentieth century literature and philosophy)

Faculty Fellow, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, 2002-3, for book project entitled The Way We Argue Now (on forms of argument within the humanities)

University of Illinois Research Board Grant, Spring 1998, for book project entitled The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment

William and Flora Hewlett Summer International Research Grant, 1997, for project on Victorian internationalism

University of Illinois Research Board Grant, Fall 1994 (for preliminary research on The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment)

Faculty Fellow, Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics, University of Illinois, Fall 1990, for book project entitled Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian
Culture

Books

On Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Study.  With Rita Felski and Toril Moi.  Chicago TRIOS series.  (University of Chicago,

                     2019).

Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

A Companion to George Eliot.  London: Blackwell, 2013.  Co-edited with Harry Shaw.  Includes 34 commissioned essays.  

The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory.  Princeton: Princeton University

                        Press, 2006.

Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.  Co-edited with Joseph Valente.

The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

 

Articles

“Cold War Aesthetics: The Case of Adorno and Trilling,” Critical Inquiry 40:4 (2014): 418-438.

"Living Theory: Personality and Doctrine in Eliot," forthcoming in A Companion to George Eliot. London: Blackwell, 2013.

A Companion to George Eliot. London: Blackwell, forthcoming 2013. Co-edited with Harry Shaw. Includes 35 commissioned essays.

"The Liberal Aesthetic," in Derek Attredge and Jane Elliott, eds., Theory after "Theory." New York: Routledge, 2011.

"Character and Ideology: The Case of Cold War Liberalism," NLH 42:2 (2011): 209-229.

"Dickens, the Brontës, Gaskell: Politics and Its Limits," in Robert Caserio and Clement Hawes, eds., The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

"The Way We Talk About the Way We Teach Now," Profession 2009: 19-27.

"Trollope's Modernity," ELH 74 (2007): 509-34.

The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

"Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities," Victorian Studies 47:2 (2005): 195-203.

"Argument and Ethos," in Jane Gallop, ed., Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (Essays from the English Institute). New York: Routledge, 2004. 103-134.

"Pragmatism and Character," Critical Inquiry 29:2 (2003): 282-301.

Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Co-edited with Joseph Valente.

The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

"The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity," Victorian Studies 43:1 (2000): 43-65.

"Universalism, Realism, and the Science of the Human," Diacritics 29:2 (1999): 3-17. (Article-length review essay of Satya P. Mohanty's, Literary Theory and the Claims of History and Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity)

"Debatable Performances: Restaging Contentious Feminisms," Social Text 54 (1998): 1-24.

"Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity," in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 265-89.

"George Eliot and the Jewish Question," The Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 39-61.

Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

"Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics of Post-structuralism." Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 63-95.

The Berlin Prize, American Academy in Berlin, 2019-2020

The John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities, the American Academy in Berlin, Spring 2020

Advisory Board, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, 2017-

The Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University, November 2015

Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Criticism and Theory, 2014-

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2009-2010

The Ward Phillips Lectures, Notre Dame, March 2008

Magnet Scholar, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, 2006-2007

Senior Fellow, School of Criticism and Theory, 2006-2014

Faculty Fellow, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University, 2002-3

University of Illinois Research Board Grant, Spring 1998

William and Flora Hewlett Summer International Research Grant, 1997

University of Illinois Research Board Grant, Fall 1994

Vice Chancellor's Teaching Scholar, University of Illinois, 1991-92

Faculty Fellow, Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics,
University of Illinois, Fall 1990

Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship, 1986-89

Cornell University Graduate Fellowship, 1984-85

Phi Beta Kappa, 1981

Modern Language Association
North American Victorian Studies Association
American Comparative Literature Association
School of Criticism and Theory

Professor Anderson teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture; politics and the novel; the theory of the novel; literary theory; George Eliot; ethics and aesthetics; and method and theory in the humanities.  She also directs a graduate program in the collaborative humanities, offered by the Cogut Institute for the humanities in partnership with faculty across the humanities and the qualitative social sciences.