Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English [1] and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. [2] 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 literary and cultural theory. [3]
Anderson received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, specializing 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 taught at the University of Illinois from 1989 until 1999 when she joined Johns Hopkins University. She was Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature from 2002 to 2012 and the head of the English department from 2003 to 2009. [4] Her graduate teaching included courses on forms of argument in contemporary theory; Victorian internationalism; Victorian realism; and ethics and aesthetics in Victorian literature. She taught undergraduate courses on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, nineteenth-century British fiction, and Victorian poetry and nonfiction prose.
She was Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University from 2008 until 2014, when she was appointed Honorary Senior Fellow. [5]
In 2012, she became Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. [1] In July 2015, she was appointed as the director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. [2] The Center became an Institute in July 2017. [6]
She delivered the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford in November 2015 under the title "Psyche and Ethos". [7]
In 2020, she launched the podcast series “Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities.” [8]
In The Way We Argue Now, Anderson 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.
In her 2012 TedxBrownUniversity talk, Anderson reflects on the "distinctive value of the humanities" and argues that the humanities "open one up to an appreciation and an understanding of the centrality of the questions of value to the human experience." [10] After Max Weber, she describes the humanities as engaged in a labor of "clarification": "in assessing works in the humanities, one comes to a better understanding of what one values and how given what one values one can make any number of practical and ethical decisions." [11]
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
George Paul Landow was Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He was a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.
Susan Stewart is an American poet and literary critic. She is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, emerita, at Princeton University. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
William Courtney Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.
Leela Gandhi is an Indian-born literary and cultural theorist who is noted for her work in postcolonial theory. She is currently the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English and director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. She is the great-granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi.
Debora Kuller Shuger is a literary historian and scholar. She studies early modern, Renaissance, late 16th- and 17th century England. She writes about Tudor-Stuart literature; religious, political, and legal thought; Neo-Latin; and censorship of that period.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment. It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
The School of Criticism and Theory, now at Cornell University, is a summer program in social science and literature. It is one of the most influential such programs in the United States to propagate the new dominant stream of "literary-critical-cultural 'theory'." The school was co-founded in 1976 by Murray Krieger, a prominent New Critic, and Hazard Adams, a literary critic, at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously been housed at Northwestern University and Dartmouth College. In 2011, Cornell hosted it for the thirteenth time. In 2002, it was directed by Dominick LaCapra.
Nina Baym (1936–2018) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1963 to 2004.
Sharon Marcus is an American academic. She is currently the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance. Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim Fellowship, and ACLS fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia.
Annabel M. Patterson is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.
Mary Longstaff Jacobus, is a British literary scholar.
Susan Laura Mizruchi is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Mark S. Cladis is an author and the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. Since arriving at Brown in 2004, he served as Chair for several 3-year terms. His teaching and scholarship are located at the various intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and environmental humanities. He has published five books. His current book project is Radical Romanticism, Democracy, and the Environmental Imagination. He has also published over sixty articles, essays, and chapters in edited books.
Caroline Levine is an American literary critic. She is the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Her published works are in the fields of Victorian literature, literary theory, literary criticism, formalism, television, and climate change.