Benedict Anderson
Political scientist and historian
Benedict Anderson was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who taught at Cornell University. He is best known for Imagined Communities, his 1983 book on the origins of nationalism.
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Irish Born 1936 in Kunming, People's Republic of China Died 2015
About Benedict Anderson
Benedict Anderson was born in Kunming, China, in 1936 and died in 2015. He lived and taught in the United States, as a professor of international studies at Cornell University. He studied classics at Cambridge and later completed a doctorate in government at Cornell, focusing on modern Indonesia. He first made his name as a scholar of Indonesia, and he was fluent in several Asian languages. His work on the Cornell Paper challenged the official account of Indonesia's 30 September Movement, and he was expelled from the country. Imagined Communities, published in 1983, explores where nationalism came from. Anderson also wrote Under Three Flags (2005), about the global anarchist movement, and a memoir, A Life Beyond Boundaries, which appeared in 2016 after his death.