The Grad Post Program Spotlight For Fall 2018
Master of Arts in English
Dr. Dustin Anderson, Program Director
The graduate program in English at Georgia Southern University prepares its students for a variety of careers or for advanced doctoral work. Students who enroll in the Master of Arts program in English enjoy the engaging atmosphere of graduate study and work closely with faculty members. Admitting 10-12 students a year, the program fosters a genuine sense of community while providing students opportunities for professional development unusual for our size.
Graduate English faculty at Georgia Southern are published scholars whose specialties are as diverse as the courses within the program. Faculty members create a stimulating and innovative learning environment for graduate students. The Center for Irish Research and Teaching adds dimension to the graduate English program. The Department also houses two international journals, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Exemplar: The Journal of South Asian Studies, sponsors the annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Conference, and coordinates the American Literature Association’s Symposium on American Fiction in Savannah. These programs enable students to become actively involved in editorial work and organizing and participating in conferences and advanced literary research.
Graduate students in the program also have the opportunity to Study Abroad in Ireland for three weeks. They learn about the country and its role in the Western world’s understanding of myth, memory, and religion on a transnational scale while exploring the countryside outward from the program’s base in Waterford. Students have the opportunity and must be enrolled in at least 4 credit hours to participate.
Dr. Dustin Anderson is Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies in the Masters in English Program, and associate faculty for The Center for Irish Research and Teaching at Georgia Southern University.
His scholarship is rooted in the complex nature of memory and forgetting. His research work focuses on the interaction between memory and the body, specifically the failures and slippages of memory, in the works of transnational authors from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, to contemporary authors like Cormac McCarthy. These fictive case-studies explore the moment of interaction between the cognitive mind and the corporeal body as memories become actions—or fail to become actions. He examines moments of memory failure or slippage in light of cognitive science developed by neurophilosphers (from Bergson to recent works by Pinker, Kandel, Ramachandran and Damásio) to discuss how these types of memory events work in studies of phantom limbs and bodies, neuro and physical memory mapping, and in neuropathies as they materialize in language.
His scholarly work has most recently appeared in Popular Modernism and Its Legacies; and also in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism; The Plays of Samuel Beckett; and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. He has an upcoming piece on “Cormac McCarthy and Romanticism.”
One of his favorite aspects of his professional work is organizing academic conferences. He has recently directed the 24th annual Cormac McCarthy Society Conference in Austin, and the 13th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in Dublin. He is also a regular organizer for the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference here in Savannah.
He has designed and taught nearly 30 separate courses since 2010.
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