Amanda Anderson

Amanda Anderson is Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the current Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, an international summer institute currently housed at Cornell University. Ms. Anderson received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and taught at the University of Illinois before moving to Hopkins in 1999. Her work has focused on questions of modern self-understanding, disciplinary methodology, and the place of critique and argumentation across philosophy and literature (with a special emphasis on liberalism and proceduralism). She is particularly interested in the legacies of philosophical modernity, the normative bases of contemporary theories, and the relation between formal argument and informing ethos (style, character, method). She is the author of 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).