Dr. Judith H. Anderson retired in 2013 after 38 years of working at Indiana University and passed in 2022. Colleagues, students, and friends alike recall her dedicated service to the English department, her careful advising and teaching of students, and her prolific and insightful scholarship. Though Anderson was reserved, her close friends consistently noted her wit and generosity.

While primarily a scholar of early modern England, her academic interests were nearly as wide-ranging as she was productive, publishing eight books, four co-edited essay collections, one translation, and over eighty essays over the course of her career, covering the writings of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne, among others. Anderson’s colleague and emerita professor of English, Joan Pong Linton, writes that “Judith’s scholarly interests range broadly, yet they are unified by her attention to language, literary form and cognition, and allegory and metaphor.” Another colleague, Heather James, writes that she was “a scholar, moved by the sheer love of knowledge to gain mastery over whole systems – genre, poetry, rhetoric, gender, modes of cognition, and more,” and that her “fearless speculation [was] based on unequivocal grounding in systems of thought across disciplines.” As her student-turned-colleague, Tamara A. Goeglein writes, Anderson’s scholarly work “explored limits and binaries in metaphors, sexualities, genres, and consciousness, and even syntax.”

Anderson’s writing was “smart, sensitive, well-written critical prose,” according to her colleague, David Lee Miller—writing that reveals her “whip-smart, uncompromising, and witty” nature. Linton also remarks that her readers “value her command of literary issues, her depth of philological understanding, and her judicious attention to formal strategy, poetic nuance, and historical context. Her writings bring into play diverse literary and rhetorical theories, so that Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine sit comfortably (or not) with Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva.”

A former student noted that Anderson’s classes were taught “with a palpable joy that was contagious, bringing to life words and worlds so apparently remote from our own.” Anderson would “[hop] from discussions of Derrida, Kathleen Williams, and Edgar Wind almost in the same breath – without ever lording over the classroom. Our own voices were constantly invited in, whether debating a line or a critical reading. I wonder if her joy sprung not only from the beauty and complexity of whatever poem we were exploring that day, but from the little intellectual community that grew over the course of four months, offering her students a glimpse of the larger intellectual community she shared with so many.”

As her colleague Sarah Van Der Laan neatly summarizes, Anderson possessed a “rigorous intellect” that was “also richly endowed with generosity and shot through with dry humour.”