Katherine Judith Anderson, PhD

she/her, Associate Professor

About

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. Twisted Words analyzes sensory representations and rhetorics of torture in nineteenth-century popular and canonical fiction, print culture, and government documents, situating state-sanctioned exceptional violence in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism and changing narratives of citizenship and human rights to theorize an embodied form of citizenship and establish 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. She’s also written for digital magazines such as Public Books, The Strategy Bridge, and The Critical Flame. Anderson is currently working on a second monograph, tentatively titled Narrating Mass Destruction: Pulp Aisthetics and Planetary Bioviolence at the Ends of Empire, which theorizes a pulp aisthetics located in the sensory depictions of (anti)colonial biowarfare and ecocatastrophe in the transimperial popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in relation to the British Empire.

Her classes explore 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 & (Anti)Colonialism Studies
  • Phenomenology & Sensory Studies
  • Aesthetics
  • Popular Fiction & Print Culture
  • Gender and Sexualities
  • Moral Philosophy