Benedict Anderson

The son of an English mother and an Irish father from a lineage of Irish nationalists, Benedict Anderson grew up between China (where he was born while his father worked in a customs office), Ireland, and the United States. He studied classics at the University of Cambridge in England, from which he graduated in 1957, and then returned to the United States to earn a PhD at Cornell, which he finished in 1967 with a dissertation on Indonesian nationalist politics. Atypically for an academic, he gained widespread fame as a graduate student for publishing the so-called “Cornell Paper,” a 1965 document in which he and his co-authors and fellow graduate students Ruth McVey and Frederick Bunnell challenged the Indonesian government’s argument that an attempted coup d’état (government overthrow) in 1966 was a Communist scheme, an argument that led to the mass murder of at least 500,000 accused Communists. The fallout of the coup and massacres contributed to the upheaval of Indonesia’s political order and the nation’s transition to a long authoritarian rule by the president Suharto. After the Cornell Paper was leaked to the public and Anderson testified in court to defend an Indonesian Communist leader, he was banned from Indonesia for the more than three decades of Suharto’s rule (until 1998, when his first trip back became an important public spectacle). Anderson then turned his research focus to Thailand and the Philippines, although he remained a prominent expert on Indonesia and even edited the academic journal Indonesia for nearly two decades. Anderson spent his entire academic career teaching at Cornell (1965-2002), where he became the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies in 1988. Although widely decorated for his whole body of work, Anderson remains by far best known for Imagined Communities, which is still widely considered the most important study of nationalism. The book remains controversial in the (characteristically Eurocentric) academic world for arguing that nationalism began in the Americas, not in Europe. After retiring in 2002, Anderson spent most of the rest of his life in Southeast Asia, where he died in eastern Java (Indonesia) in 2015.