Professor Anderson is the department's specialist in the history of ancient Greece. He is a graduate of the universities of Newcastle and London in his native Britain, and holds MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in Classics from Yale University.

Professor Anderson's primary research areas are archaic Greece, classical Athens, and social theory. His work explores articulations between culture, politics, and the production of material life. His first book, The Athenian Experiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), addressed the cultural implications of the shift from a narrow oligarchic regime to a more socially inclusive political formation in pre-classical Athens. Among his more recent publications, one article reconsiders the cultural construction of "tyranny" in archaic Greece, while another makes a case for seeing the classical Greek "state" as a cultural "effect," the product of a complex entanglement between the material and the ideational. His current book project (Illiberal Athens) is a postmodern Marxist "social ecology" of classical Athens, an account of the inequalities, the exploitations, and the other costs of producing a "free society" in Greek antiquity.