CAROLINE DONOVAN PROFESSORSHIP IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Established in 1889 by Caroline Donovan, as the University's first named chair
In the fall of 1889, CAROLINE DONOVAN, a prominent Baltimore philanthropist, was counseled by Mayor Ferdinand Latrobe to endow a professorship at Hopkins. This was the first endowed chair and a key contribution in a ground-breaking year for philanthropy at the University: the beginning of an endowment beyond the funds left by the University's founder, Johns Hopkins. Mrs. Donovan's commitment, along with two other major gifts that year, prompted Hopkins President Daniel Coit Gilman to pronounce that "The era of great gifts has begun!"
AMANDA ANDERSON, the Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and chair of the Department of English, joined Hopkins in 1999. Dr. Anderson is the recipient of numerous awards for both her teaching and her scholarly work. She specializes in Victorian literature and contemporary literary, cultural, and political theory. Her work on the Victorian period has focused on the relation between forms of modern thought and knowledge (across both literature and the human sciences) and understandings of selfhood, social life, and ethics. She also has an ongoing interest in the forms of argument that structure contemporary academic debate in the humanities. She is the author of Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006). She is also co-editor, with Joseph Valente, of Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.
In the fall of 1889, CAROLINE DONOVAN, a prominent Baltimore philanthropist, was counseled by Mayor Ferdinand Latrobe to endow a professorship at Hopkins. This was the first endowed chair and a key contribution in a ground-breaking year for philanthropy at the University: the beginning of an endowment beyond the funds left by the University's founder, Johns Hopkins. Mrs. Donovan's commitment, along with two other major gifts that year, prompted Hopkins President Daniel Coit Gilman to pronounce that "The era of great gifts has begun!" 
AMANDA ANDERSON, the Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and chair of the Department of English, joined Hopkins in 1999. Dr. Anderson is the recipient of numerous awards for both her teaching and her scholarly work. She specializes in Victorian literature and contemporary literary, cultural, and political theory. Her work on the Victorian period has focused on the relation between forms of modern thought and knowledge (across both literature and the human sciences) and understandings of selfhood, social life, and ethics. She also has an ongoing interest in the forms of argument that structure contemporary academic debate in the humanities. She is the author of Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006). She is also co-editor, with Joseph Valente, of Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle.