Anderson is a Professor of Latin American Literature and the chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in the literature, history, and cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean and has offered classes on many topics including Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican literature, history and popular culture and human rights in Latin American literature and film. Anderson is a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies and of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies. From the latter he received a Faculty Residential Fellowship, which facilitated his research for his first book, Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera (Bucknell University Press, 2006), the first comprehensive study of one of Cuba’s leading writers and thinkers of the 20th Century.
Anderson has lectured and published widely on a variety of topics related to the Hispanic Caribbean, and his articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals including Casa de las Américas, Revista Iberoamericana, Hispanófila, Revista Interamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (San Juan), Latin American Theatre Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (St. Louis), Afro-Hispanic Review, La Simepreviva among others.
Professor Anderson’s second book, Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo (University of Florida Press, 2011), has been hailed as “a major contribution to the study of Cuban literature and culture” and “the most original and in-depth study of the heterogeneous body of texts associated with the literary and cultural movement known as Afocubanism.” A translation of this book will be published in Cuba (Santiago de Cuba: Oriente) in 2019. Professor Anderson has recently completed Piñera corresponsal: una vida en cartas (IILI, Pittsburgh, 2016), an edition of the correspondence of the Cuban writer, Virgilio Piñera, and he is presently working on a book about images of the US Civil Rights Movement in Cuban Poetry.
Professor Anderson is an avid collector of Puerto Rican books and graphic art and is especially interested in the work produced by Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO). In Spring 2012, Anderson and his wife Marisel Moreno co-organized a major exhibit of DIVEDCO art from their personal collection at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. Anderson and Moreno also co-authored the exhibit catalog – Art at the Service of the People: Posters and Books from Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education, 1949-1989 – which contains over 80 color plates. This exhibit traveled to California Lutheran University in 2016, and will be on display at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture in Chicago from August 2018 through early Spring 2019.
