Please join the English Department for the 2026 Annual Lora Hutchins Heberle Award and Lecture with Professor Amanda Anderson of Brown University.

Some of the most influential frameworks for understanding human thought -- in psychology, in moral and political philosophy, and in cognitive science -- have failed to recognize the quality, form, and significance of slow, persistent ruminative processes oriented toward experiences of moral shock or disturbance. Such experiences include but are not limited to profound loss, grief, regret, or injury, including those fundamental assaults on dignity we might designate as status-injury. Drawing on examples from the literary tradition, I demonstrate that rumination is a productive moral process and not merely a psychological symptom of oversensitivity or trauma endured.

Amanda Anderson is Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities. Her research focuses on broad questions of intellectual history, disciplinary formation, and the relations among literature, moral life, and politics. Her books include Humanities Theory (Oxford University Press, 2025; with Simon During); Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, TRIOS series, 2019; with Rita Felski and Toril Moi), Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Oxford University Press, Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, 2018), Bleak Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton University Press, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 1993). She is co-editor of George Eliot: A Companion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 2002). She leads the Cogut Institute’s Collaborative Humanities Initiative.