Margaret Lavinia Anderson is professor emerita at University of California Berkeley where she teaches about Europe since 1453; Central Europe from the late 18th century, especially modern Germany; World War I; Fascist Europe. She won a 2001 Berlin prize by the American Academy in Berlin, and was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. She was a fellow at Stanford Humanities Center.

Her research is about political culture, including electoral politics, in Imperial Germany and in comparative European perspective; the intersection of religion and politics; religion and society–especially Catholicism in the 19th century. She is now working on the relations (on the level of governments as well as civil society) between Germany and the Ottoman Empire from the time of the Hamidian massacres of the Ottoman Armenians in 1894-1896 to c. 1933. She was on the Academic Advisory Council of the German Historical Institute.

She completed her Ph.D. at Brown University and her B.A. at Swarthmore College.

She is married to James J. Sheehan, a historian at Stanford University.