Dr. Mark Cronlund Anderson

Dr. Mark Anderson is Professor of History at the Luther College, and has a PhD which he received from the University of California in 1995.

has published five books, including, with Carmen Robertson, Seeing Red, A history of Natives in Canadian Newspapers,  which garnered three Saskatchewan book awards, and Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film, which won the 2010 Cawelti Award for best book in American history, awarded jointly by the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association. His forthcoming book (spring 2016) is titled Holy War: Cowboys, Indians, and 9/11s.

“Splitting Tongues: Imagining Natives in Reader’s Digest and TIME”

How Canadian and American newspapers and magazines have depicted Aboriginal peoples speaks directly to national creation stories. This project explores and compares portrayals of Natives from the popular spilt-run periodicals Reader’s Digest and Time magazine, published in Canada, and their counterparts published in the United States from 1950 through 1998.

Conversation

HRI
What motivated or sparked you to become a humanities researcher/scholar?

MA
Curiosity, ADHD, and birth order.

HRI
How did you come to your research focus/disciplinary specialization?

MA
I have two responses. The short answer is the Stockholm Syndrome. The longer answer is that in the process of conducting the research to write a book you find that you knock, in one way or another, on a lot of doors. And some of the doors open, at least a little bit. So then you have a choice to make. Okay, let’s assume that you pass through one of the doors. Now it gets tricky because you have to carefully consider mundane details such as calculating the likelihood of grant funding, prospects for securing a press that will publish your work, and so on. In other words, you’ve got to think pragmatically: is the project doable? Moreover, choosing to walk through one door inevitably means that others will close behind you.

HRI
What future plans do you have for your research and its direction?

MA
This slice of research, I mean, really it amounts to a chapter in a future book, grows from my previous work. In particular, I am here referencing Seeing Red, A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers (2011), which I wrote with Carmen Robertson, Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film (2007), and my forthcoming study Holy War: Cowboys, Indians and 9/11s (UR Press, 2016). One thing leads to another. In short, I see this project contributing, say, chapter four, in a book I expect to complete in no more than two years.

HRI
Which humanities scholar or creative practitioner inspires you and why?

MA
Two things. First, Marx, Freud, Foucault, Stanley Kubrick, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucinda Williams, you know, the usual suspects. Thing is, humanities scholars basically explore patterns of behaviour. Then they attempt to explain what they have “discovered” based on their reading of the literature as it filters through their life experiences. (This is why I have come to mostly prefer novelists. They strike me as more honestly engaged in the fiction of writing fiction.)

Second, that said, I still find that the rubber really does hit the road. And it is the tension between the post-structural/colonial/modern/and so on and the structural/modernist/etcetera that, for me, breathes life into the intellectual as well as the physical energy required to see a project to completion. I invariably find the process of creation both stimulating and liberating.

HRI
What are two things about your humanities research that make them relevant to other researchers, scholars or students? To the broader public?

MA
To paraphrase a quote from “Mistress America,” I was raised to be at least somewhat modest. So let me just say that I am not in a position to comment on what others might find useful or “relevant” (a term that I do not care for) in my work. With respect to the “broader public,” well, I guess I don’t like this term either. It tends to shelter and displace racism, misogyny, colonialism, and such, led by the nose by a media feeding on and fed by reptilian hunger.

HRI
If you had one piece of advice for those wishing to pursue the humanities what would it be?

MA
Read at least 50 novels a year, travel a lot (anywhere, just get off your ass and go) and then take joy in blistering your feet, and never learn, never learn, never learn to say no to the opportunity to exhaust yourself in the pursuit of an idea, suffer withering criticism for it, or grapple with self doubt.