Anderson received her Ph.D. in English from
Cornell University. She taught at the
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign from 1989 until 1999 when she joined the faculty of
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. She was appointed Senior Fellow at the
School of Criticism and Theory at
Cornell University and served as Director of the School from 2008 until 2014, when she was appointed Honorary Senior Fellow. In 2012, she joined the faculty at Brown University as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English. At the institute, she developed the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, which sponsors a doctoral certificate in Collaborative Humanities. She has anchored the co-taught capstone course of the certificate, a Project Development Workshop, since 2019. The certificate and capstone course draw doctoral students from across the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. In her role as director she has also served on the advisory board of the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes since 2017. She delivered the Clarendon Lectures at the
University of Oxford in November 2015 under the title “Psyche and Ethos”. They were published in book form by
Oxford University Press in 2018. From 2020–2023, she hosted the Cogut Institute’s podcast series “Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities.” The show features scholars speaking about a broad array of topics in the humanities, including environmental humanities, AI and big data, disability studies, critical university studies, and collaborative projects in mental health, virtual reality, happiness studies, and
Black studies. ==Awards==