Penelope Anderson

Penelope Anderson is Associate Professor of English. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender, and political theory, her scholarship and teaching investigate how stories of societies’ origins and histories solidify into seemingly inevitable versions of why things are the way they are. Her first book, Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), provides an alternative account of state formation in which women writers refashion themselves as central, rather than marginal, to civic life. Her current book project, Humanity in Suspension: Gender and International Law in Seventeenth-Century Literature, shows that gender plays a crucial, under-studied role in the origins of human rights in international law.