John Anderson

Dr. Anderson, a performance studies scholar and Associate Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies, focuses his research in the area of narrative theory and performance. He is the author of The Student Companion to William Faulkner (Greenwood, 2007). His 2017 essay "The Medium is the Mother: Elsie McLuhan, Elocution, and Her Son Marshall" appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly and earned him the 2019 National Communication Association's Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies. In 2013, Dr. Anderson was co-recipient of the NCA's Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance, and he received the NCA's Performance Studies Division Distinguished Service Award in 2014.

He performs nationally in his one-person shows as authors Henry James, William Faulkner, Washington Irving, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, and others. Recent performances includes appearances as Washington Irving at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Tennessee (2018 and 2019) and as Ernest Hemingway at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Arkansas (2019). He has received Chautauqua grants to present humanities programs on early America, the Civil War, the 1930s, the Centennial of Oklahoma statehood, Hollywood's Impact on American Culture, World War I, and the Rise of Modernism. Dr. Anderson is a former Chair of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association and served as Director of the Honors Program at Emerson for ten years.