[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 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.
[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.