Welcome!

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 Literature, Theory, and Cultural Studies (English) 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.

This summer, I am working on a book chapter on ecohorror in Stephen King’s The Shining as well as an article on contemporary American women’s horror fiction.

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@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 many major paint manufacturing companies offer variants of the shade today.

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.