Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Amanda Anderson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities. Her research focuses on broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. Her books include Rumination: A Vindication (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2027); Humanities Theory (Oxford University Press, 2025; with Simon During); Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, TRIOS series, 2019; with Rita Felski and Toril Moi), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Oxford University Press, Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 1993). She is co-editor of George Eliot: A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002). She served as the institute director from 2015 to 2026 and is the faculty director of the Cogut Institute's Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities and team-teaches its capstone Project Development Workshop.