Katherine J. Anderson, PhD

She/her, Associate Professor, and Graduate Coordinator (MA)

About

Pronunciation: Katherine: KA-th-er-in, Judith: JOO-dith, Anderson: AN-der-sun

Dr. Anderson is the author of Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain (The Ohio State University Press, 2022), which argues for the centrality of torture to Victorian history and culture, and consequently, the importance of Victorian history and culture to a global and historical understanding of torture. Tracing torture through India, Jamaica, southern Africa, Oceania, and Britain itself, Anderson situates state-sanctioned exceptional violence in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism and changing narratives of citizenship and human rights, establishing a longer historical genealogy of torture and terrorism as tools of liberal Western governments.

Additional work can be found in Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Review, the Journal of Language & Literacy Education, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, and the 2017 Routledge edited collection Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature (edited by Lisa Kasmer). She’s also written for digital magazines such as Public Books, The Strategy Bridge, and BigCityLit.

Anderson is currently researching a second monograph, tentatively titled Narrating Mass Destruction: Pulp Fiction and Planetary Biohazards at the Ends of Empire, which examines the ethics, technologies, and ecologies of biowarfare in the literature and global histories of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, particularly in relation to the British Empire.

Her classes explore nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literature through topics such as monster fiction, the Gothic and horror, gender and sexualities, (anti)imperialism/colonialism, science fiction, post-9/11 literature, and the serial killer as figured in popular culture.

Research Interests

  • British and Anglophone Literature
  • Victorian Studies
  • Empire Studies
  • Critical Terrorism Studies
  • War Studies
  • Phenomenology & Embodiment
  • Moral and Political Philosophy
  • Gender & Sexualities