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Education

2009 Boston College, B.A.
2016 University of Pennsylvania Law School, J.D.
2022 George Washington University, Ph.D.

View CV

Courses Taught

U.S. Constitutional History
Cities and Global Connections
Legal Writing and Research
Moot Court
The History of Mass Incarceration
Race, Urban Space and Popular Culture

Career Specialties

Colin Anderson is a lawyer and a historian who specializes in U.S. history, with a focus on the late 19th century. His research and teaching interests include urban history, the history of popular culture, the history of race, the historical relationship between race and geographic mobility, and the development of racial segregation.

He is the director of ��«Ӱҵampa's minor in law, justice and advocacy.

Professional and Community Activities

Anderson's first book project, Culture and Containment: Race, Geographic Mobility and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (under contract with UNC Press),��examines the deep historical links between race, geographic mobility and popular culture during the transformative period historians call “Greater Reconstruction,” 1845–1900. From sheet music and lithographs to plantation reenactments and Wild West shows, white cultural producers depicted Black and Native mobility as destabilizing, normalizing fears of movement and justifying the rise of Jim Crow segregation and Native American reservations, two systems designed to confine these communities. Using a trans-regional framework spanning the North, South and West, Culture and Containment��places these histories side by side, revealing the shared logic of racial spatial control and reframing nineteenth-century U.S. history as a story of nation-building intertwined with segregation and capitalism. However, the book also shows that popular culture was a contested space. Black and Native performers, writers and activists used the same platforms to assert agency, resist confinement and challenge dominant narratives of mobility.

Anderson's prior publications include the articles "Imagining Residential Segregation before the Ghetto: Representations of Black Urban Space and Mobility in the 'Darktown' Comics, 1877-1900," in the Journal of Urban History, and "Segregation, Popular Culture, and the Southern Pastoral: The Spatial and Racial Politics of American Sheet Music, 1870-1900," in the Journal of Southern History. He has presented research papers at the annual meetings of the Organizations of American Historians, the Urban History Association, the National Association of African American Studies and Affiliates, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

Anderson is also the coach of the University of Tampa's Moot Court team.

Honors and Awards

Anderson graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was executive editor of the law school's Journal of Law and Social Change. He has received research fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan and the Jeffrey C. Kasch Foundation. He is admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts.