Eric Gary Anderson

Director of Graduate Programs

Associate Professor

Literature: American Indian literatures, Southern studies, Horror and Gothic studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, American fiction from the beginnings to the 21st century

Eric Gary Anderson has published more than thirty-five essays in edited volumes and journals, including "Big Indigeneity" (in PMLA), "'A Shape to Fill a Lack': Faulkner and Indigenous Studies" in The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge, 2022), "Native American Horror, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction" (in The Cambridge History of Native American Literature), and "'Letting the Other Story Go: The Native South in and beyond the Anthropocene," which he co-wrote with Melanie Benson Taylor for their co-edited 2019 special issue of Native South on Native Southern Literature. With Kirstin Squint, Anthony Wilson, and Taylor Hagood, he is a co-editor of Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies (Louisiana State University Press, 2020). And with Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner, he co-edited Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 2015). From 2012-14, he served as President of The Society for the Study of Southern Literature. At Mason, he serves as Director of Graduate Studies and coordinates the interdisciplinary minor in Native American & Indigenous Studies. In 2014, he won a University Teaching Excellence Award with special acknowledgment of his contributions to Mason Core.

Current Research

He is currently working on two book projects: "The Indigenous Undead" investigates haunted people, trees, houses, and other places and things in 20th- and 21st-century Native and Indigenous literatures, and "Slasher Ecologies" takes a new, green look at slasher fiction and film. Forthcoming work includes a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic, a chapter on Stephen Graham Jones for a collection on Horror and Indigeneity, and a co-edited collection, "The Impossible Shot: Race, Genre, and Spectacle in Jordan Peele's Nope," which is due out in the not-too distant future from the University Press of Mississippi.

Selected Publications

"Ecologies of the Undead: George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo and the Limits of EcoGothic." Studies in American Fiction Special 50th Anniversary Issue, "Ecogothic," 50: 1-2 (Spring-Fall 2023). 165-188.

"'A Shape to Fill a Lack': Faulkner and Indigenous Studies." In The New William Faulkner Studies. Edited by Sarah Gleeson-White and Pardis Dabashi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 151-165.

"Letting the Other Story Go: The Native South in and beyond the Anthropocene." With Melanie Benson Taylor. Co-authored essay for special issue of Native South on "Native Southern Literature," issue co-edited by Anderson and Taylor. Native South 12 (2019): 74-98.

Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. Co-edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015.

"Native Southern Transformations, or, Light in August and Werewolves." In Faulkner and the Native South: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2016. Edited by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer and James G. Thomas, Jr. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 148-166.

"The Truth Is South There: The X-Files's Transregional Souths." In Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television, edited by Lisa Hinrichsen, Gina Caison, and Stephanie Rountree. Louisiana State University Press, 2017. 221-240.

"The Landscape of Disaster: Hemingway, Porter, and the Soundings of Indigenous Silence." With Melanie Benson Taylor. Co-authored essay for "Modernism and Native America," a special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 59: 3 (Fall 2017). 319-352.

"Literary and Textual Histories of the Native South." The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the U.S. South. Ed. Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 17-32.

"On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession." Southern Spaces (Aug. 2007). (Available online)

Expanded Publication List

"Indigenous Young Adult Novels." Special issue of Studies in the Novel (54: 3, Fall 2022), co-edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Angela Calcaterra, and Christopher Pexa.

"Queer Native Southern Transmissions in Randy Redroad's The Doe Boy. In Queering the South on Screen. Edited by Tison Pugh. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. 194-212.

"Introduction: Why Native Southern Literatures Matter." With Melanie Benson Taylor. Co-authored introduction for special issue of Native South on "Native Southern Literature," issue co-edited by Anderson and Taylor. Native South 12 (2019): 3-9.

"Earthworks and Contemporary Indigenous American Literature: Foundations and Futures." Native South 9 (2016). 1-26.

"Raising the Indigenous Undead." In The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow, editors. 323-335.

"Native." In Keywords for Southern Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016). Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson, editors. 166-178.

"Reimagining 'The South' and 'The North' as Native Space." In "First Nations and Native Souths on Both Sides of the 49th Parallel," an essay cluster with contributions by Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder and Eric Gary Anderson. The Global South 9: 1 (Spring 2015): 39-61 (for the cluster), 51-58 (for my essay in the cluster).

"The Fall of the House of Po' Sandy: Poe, Chesnutt, and Southern Undeadness." In Undead Souths.

"Robert Frost and a 'Native America.'" In Frost in Context. Ed. Mark Richardson. Cambridge University Press, 2014. 233-240.

"Red Crosscurrents: Performative Spaces and Indian Cultural Authority in the Florida Atlantic Captivity Narrative of Jonathan Dickinson." Southern Roots and Routes: Origins, Migrations, Transformations. Special issue of Mississippi Quarterly (65:1, Winter 2012), guest-edited by Susan Donaldson, Suzanne Jones, and Eric Gary Anderson. 17-32.

"The Presence of Early Native Studies: A Response to Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss." American Literary History 22:2 (Summer 2010). 280-288. Jointly published in Early American Literature 45:2 (2010). 251-260.

"Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders." PMLA 122.1 (2007): 194-209.

"South to a Red Place: Contemporary American Indian Literature and the Problem of Native/Southern Studies." Mississippi Quarterly 60.1 (2006-07): 5-32.

"Indian Agency: Life of Black Hawk and the Countercolonial Provocations of Early Native American Writing." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52.1-2 (2006): 75-104.

"Environed Blood: Ecology and Violence in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary." Faulkner and the Ecology of the South: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. Ed. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann L. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 30-46.

"Captivity and Freedom: Ann Eliza Bleecker, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle.'" A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. London: Blackwell, 2004. 342-52.

"Situating American Indian Poetry: Place, Community, and the Question of Genre." Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Ed. Janice Gould and Dean Rader. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. 34-55.

"Ecocriticism, Native American Literature, and the South: The Inaccessible Worlds of Linda Hogan's Power." South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Ed. Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 165-83.

American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Courses Taught

ENGL 202: Ghosts and Monsters OR Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the 1920s

ENGL 352: Haunted Native America

ENGL 355: Contemporary Fiction

ENGH 419: Popular Horror

ENGH 442: 20th- and 21st-Century Southern Fictions

ENGL 500: Research in English Studies

ENGL 644: Undead Souths

Dissertations Supervised

Melissa Beard, Reclaiming My Family’s Story: Cultural Trauma and Indigenous Ways of Knowing (2020)