Judith H. Anderson earned her A.B. from Radcliffe College in 1961. She went on to earn both her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1962 and 1965, respectively. Anderson joined the Indiana University (IU) faculty in 1978 as an associate professor of English and was promoted to professor in 1979. Before retiring with her Emeritus title in May of 2013, she earned the title Chancellor’s Professor of English in 1999. Prior to joining the IU faculty, Anderson taught at Cornell University as an assistant professor and served as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan. Anderson's primary interests were in the literature and culture of the English Renaissance. They encompassed biography, rhetoric, language, philosophy, religion, and history. Her publications include The Growth of a Personal Voice: "Piers Plowman" and The Faerie Queene (1976), Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (1984), Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (1996), Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (2005), Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (2008), and three co-edited volumes: Will's Vision of Piers Plowman, by William Langland (1990), Spenser's Life and the Subject of Biography (1996), and Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars (2007). She was a fellow at the National Humanities Center and held four major research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in addition to Dulin and Mayers Foundation Fellowships at the Folger and Huntington Libraries, respectively. She directed a Folger Institute Seminar and twice was elected president of the International Spenser Society, from which she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. At IU, she received the Outstanding Woman Scholar Award and Teaching Excellence Award.