Welcome!

As of August 2025, I am an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Crookston, where I also serve as the Director of the First-Year Seminar.

I recently earned my PhD in English (specifically in Literature, Theory, and Cultural Studies) as well as a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Purdue University. My dissertation, Spaces of Assimilation: Multiethnic American Women’s Writing and the Gothic, analyzes how minority and immigrant women writers employ gothic tropes to narrate the pressures of assimilation into white Protestant American culture throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

An instructor of writing, literature, and film, I am currently teaching Introduction to World Literature, Ancient to Seventeenth-Century World Literature, and Introduction to University Life.

Outside of academia, I enjoy painting, walking along the Red River, and watching horror films. If you would like to learn more, feel free to email me at aanders@crk.umn.edu.

The Haunting Legacy of Haint Blue

This site’s background image depicts a series of aged wooden boards painted a light blue color.

This hue is colloquially known as “haint blue,” a variation of “haunt blue,” and it is commonly painted on ceilings in the southern United States. The color is created from indigo plants grown in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where it was planted, tended, and harvested by enslaved Africans. The Gullah Geechee people (descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved in the U.S.) believed ghosts and spirits would mistake a light blue ceiling for sky and, assuming they were outside, would pass through a home without haunting it. The Gullah Geechee’s cultural practice of painting ceilings haint blue spread throughout the southeast, to the extent that today many major paint manufacturing companies offer variants of the shade.

As an American Gothic scholar interested in multicultural perspectives, the widespread popularization of haint blue reminds me that myriad beliefs and practices surrounding death and dying continue to affect aesthetics and material culture in the United States.