Rate My Professor Eric Anderson

Eric Gary Anderson is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, where he joined the Department of English in 2004 as Term Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005. Prior to George Mason, he served as Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University from 1995 to 2000 and Associate Professor from 2000 to 2005, as well as Visiting Lecturer in History at Rutgers University in 1994-1995 and Lecturer in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. He also taught as a Teaching Assistant and Lecturer in English at Rutgers University from 1982 to 1993. Anderson holds a Ph.D. in Literatures in English from Rutgers University (1994), with a dissertation titled Southwestern Dispositions: American Literature on the Borderlands, 1880-1980; an M.A. in English from the same institution (1983); and an A.B. with High Honors in English from Rutgers College (1981).

Anderson's scholarly work centers on American Indian literature, particularly contexts and dispositions in the Southwest, as well as Southern literature, gothic elements, ecology, and violence. His key publications include the monograph American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (University of Texas Press, 1999), which examines cultural encounters through texts ranging from Roswell myths to works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Willa Cather. He co-edited Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), exploring hauntings, horror, and undeadness in Southern contexts from Edgar Allan Poe to contemporary media like True Blood and The Walking Dead. Selected articles feature 'The Presence of Early Native Studies: A Response to Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss' in American Literary History (2010), 'Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders' in PMLA (2007), and 'South to a Red Place: Contemporary American Indian Literature and the Problem of Native/Southern Studies' in Mississippi Quarterly (2006-07). At George Mason, he teaches courses such as Native American Literature, Popular Horror (ENGL 419), and Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond (ENGH 400, Spring 2026), blending literature with supernatural themes. Anderson received the 2014 George Mason University Teaching Excellence Award with special recognition in General Education, along with earlier honors including the Newberry Library/South Central Modern Language Association Fellowship (2002) and multiple Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities Research Grants (1996, 1998).