The historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson was born in 1936 in Kunming, China, to an Irish father and an English mother. In 1941, the family moved to California and subsequently relocated to Ireland in 1945. Anderson received a degree in classics from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in government from Cornell in 1967. He taught at Cornell as a professor of international studies until his retirement in 2002.

Anderson specialized in Southeast Asia studies and spoke Indonesian, Javanese, Thai, Tagalong, and several European languages fluently. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, he became an anti-imperialist during the Suez Crisis of 1956, an experience that influenced his later work as a critic of colonialism. As a graduate student, he co-wrote an influential paper refuting the official Indonesian government’s account of the brutal genocide that followed the abortive coup d’état in 1965. During this purge, at least 500,000 Indonesians were massacred by the army under Suharto’s leadership because of real or supposed links to the Indonesian Communist Party. Anderson was expelled from the country in 1972 for his criticism of Suharto’s regime and not allowed to reenter Indonesia until 1998, when Suharto’s dictatorship ended.

In addition to Imagined Communities (1983), his most widely-known and influential work, Anderson wrote extensively on the politics, social history, and cultures of Indonesia, Thailand, Java, and other Southeast Asian nations.