Professor Anderson's research explores the histories and legacies of punishment, imprisonment, and penal transportation across the world. Beginning with her PhD on Britain's nineteenth-century penal settlement for Indian convict labour in Mauritius, she has spent her career uncovering the experiences of convicts and other marginalised people whose stories have often been overlooked in traditional histories.
Her early work was supported by the British Academy and ESRC. It mapped networks of Asian penal transportation across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, while also contributing to understanding the transportation of African, Asian, and Creole convicts to Britain's Australian colonies. In collaboration with colleagues in India, she subsequently examined the convict histories of the Andaman Islands. Building on this regional expertise, she developed a broader global perspective on the history of punishment and incarceration.
Professor Anderson then led a major ERC-funded project investigating the penal settlements and colonies of European empires, Russia, Japan, China, and post-colonial Latin America, spanning the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. This prize-winning work has helped reshape understanding of the global history of penal colonies and coerced mobility.
Throughout her career, Professor Anderson has been committed to writing histories from below, balancing large-scale historical processes with the lived experiences of ordinary people. Her research has explored diverse themes, including the use of biography to recover the voices and dignity of colonised communities, the meanings of convicts' tattoos as expressions of identity and resistance, and the ways incarcerated people challenged colonial systems of labour and control.
A central concern of her most recent work has been the continuing relevance of colonial histories of punishment in the modern world. This has included research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, into the descendants of Asian, African, Creole, and Indigenous convicts transported around the British and French empires during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining archival research with interviews and community focus groups, this work explores the impact of penal transportation on families and communities today.
She has also become interested in how prison operations and experiences manifest in post-colonial criminal justice systems. The British Academy and ESRC has funded collaborative work with researchers at the University of Guyana and the Guyana Prison Service on a long-term project exploring incarceration, mental health, and addiction from 1825 to the present, a programme that expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic to include research on the history of pandemics and imprisonment. Professor Anderson's current programme, Prisons, Drugs and Mental Health: An Interdisciplinary Global Study, is funded by the Wellcome Trust. It brings together historical and contemporary approaches to understanding incarceration and wellbeing including in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.
Professor Anderson's research has been supported by substantial external funding. As Principal Investigator, she has secured more than £6.55 million in research grants from organisations including the British Academy, Carnegie Trust, ESRC, ERC, Leverhulme Trust, and Wellcome Trust, alongside more than £500,000 as sponsor of independent postdocs and over £250,000 as an Investigator on collaborative AHRC and ESRC doctoral awards.
She has also supported a number of internationally recognised early career researchers through Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust, and Rutherford Commonwealth fellowships. Her work has taken her to archives and former penal colony sites across the Caribbean, South America, Bermuda, South Africa, the Indian Ocean, India, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, and the Pacific, providing a truly global perspective on the histories she studies.
A key aspect of her work is ensuring that historical research informs public understanding and contemporary policy debates. She contributed to the Australian Government's successful bid to secure UNESCO World Heritage Status for Australia's Convict Sites, research that later underpinned a REF impact case study.
Supported by ESRC Impact Accelerator Awards, Professor Anderson has developed a range of international partnerships that connect academic research with practitioners, heritage organisations, and local communities. These include collaborations with colleagues at the University of the West Indies to explore the historical roots of contemporary sentencing practices in the Caribbean; a partnership with the Association Témoignage d'un Passé and the Site Historique du Bagne de l'Île Nou, resulting in a co-curated exhibition on the transportation of Vietnamese convicts to New Caledonia; and community-based work with the custodians of the Makam Dato Koyah shrine in Penang, Malaysia, to develop historically informed resources and public engagement activities.
Through these projects, Professor Anderson seeks not only to advance scholarship but also to demonstrate how historians can work with the public, and to show that histories of punishment, migration, and colonialism continue to shape societies around the world today.